Paul Carr of TechCrunch has it right. Tell your email recipients to print the message and then burn it. I, too, am constantly niggled by what Paul dubs “The Footer Fascists” who include a long exhortation to save the environment at the foot of every email. As Paul says, this doesn’t do a scrap of good except annoy recipients. People who don’t print emails (the majority of us) will continue not to print. Those that do will not be stopped by any environmental message which does nothing but make the sender feel righteous.
You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them. Those screamingly pompous email footers that IT departments append to millions – billions? – of emails every day, urging us to “Consider the environment!” before asking “Do you really need to print this email?
The final straw came for Paul when his publisher, Hachette, a company whose whole endeavours are devoted to the “decimation of forests in the pursuit of knowledge and entertainment” began urging him to think twice before printing the mail: “Please consider the environment. Do you really need to print this email”
Paul has updated his own email footer with the line: “F**k the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.” It turns out that Paul isn’t alone and his new footer is going viral. I think I’ll jump on this bandwagon myself with a slight variation in wordage of course.