Webmaster’s Inbox

Email is to the webmaster what painful blisters are to the lumberjack. It’s an aspect of the job that’s as necessary as it is irritating. 

Here’s a glimpse of the webmaster’s inbox on a typical day:

I wonder if every message in the Commissioner of Baseball’s inbox has the subject line “re: baseball”? Are all of God’s incoming missives labeled “re: universe”? Well, I suppose maybe they are. But that doesn’t change the fact that just once I’d like to see a specific, informative subject line when I scan my inbox. Something along the lines of “re: I’m changing everything but not paying you any more money for it” or “re: ridiculous, uninformed instructions regarding my already unsalvageable website” would be refreshing.

As to the content of the messages themselves, it runs the gamut from merely annoying to shockingly condescending to outright offensive. There are many genres and variations, but there are two distinct overall categories: messages from users, and messages from clients. 

User messages from people under eighteen years of age are usually some variation of “dood you sight SUXz, nuthin WErK!”, while notes from adults contain phrases like “the link didn’t click”, “it won’t let me”, and “it can’t be my computer because my son helped me install the internet.” These are actually fun to receive, as they are easily deleted without consequence, and provide webmasters with hilarious fodder when hanging out with other webmasters (at webmaster bars in the webmaster district).

Client email, on the other hand, must be read and responded to quickly and positively. This is not easy as most of it is ill informed, outrageously demanding, and often harder to comprehend than a Charlie Kaufman screenplay (but not half as fun to read).

There are many stages in the client/webmaster relationship, all producing their share of ludicrous email. Here’s a typical message from the very early stages of a project:

This sets the stage for what will follow: the webmaster will struggle to perform his duties “correctly” and “efficiently”, while the client continues to ask for or demand unwise, impractical, or even impossible things. But surely it gets better in the later stages, no? No.

If something is ugly, if something is inaccessible to the majority of users, if something is expensive, if something is difficult to pull off well, your client will want THAT on his or her website. This is a guarantee.

Of course I’ve failed to mention a unique and prevalent breed of client: the phone-obsessed client. Not only does this fellow love to chew your ear off on the phone, he appears to hate or at least fear the device known as a computer, to the extent that he’ll only use email as a method of setting up phone appointments or – even more horrifying to the freelance webmaster – a face to face meeting. (Ugh, gives me shivers just typing it!) Here is a common email from the phone-obsessed client:

So what is a webmaster to do? We need our clients as much as they need us. We need to receive emails so we can avert calamities like phone conversations and inter-personal communication. So from where I’m sitting, there appears to be only one solution: drugs.