How to use a subject line

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Let’s pretend that you’ve read this article, this very article, this very one.

And you first learned of it because a friend, not just any friend, but a true friend, sent you an email about it.

After all, anyone who sends you a link to my articles must be a true friend; or a least someone you would want as a friend.

But now, it’s a month later.  Perhaps years. Nigh, centuries, millennia, …

And you want to reference this article as part of explaining to one of the less enlightened the most effective ways to email to impress their boss and begin the arduous climb up the company ladder to success.

You’ve read millions of articles since then. Some of them were probably written by people other than me. (I can forgive you for that provided that you read all of my articles first.)

Scrolling through your huge web browser history list is not going to work.

Instead, you will be looking at the list of thousands of subject lines in your email history. If the title or the subject line was “How to use a subject line,” it is a bit easier than if it is the 40th message in a thread  “RE: Will be late to our lunch meeting.”

In that latter case, I start to wonder “Which needle did you lose that haystack in?” or something like that anyway.