A group of media colleagues and I were moaning about our excessive email at a function last week and how we battle to get to the ends of our inboxes. The problem it was concluded, was the PR industry. I receive over 1GB of email a month - that is 1000 Megabytes (MBs) for the uninitiated. The problem is that the PR industry do not understand email and how to communicate properly with journalists and they're not informing their clients either. We do not want: huge pix files - they cost us money as they use up our bandwidth and as online media, we can't even use high res pix as our readers wouldn't be able to download them either; we don't want your logo embedded in the email, it makes the email bigger than it needs to be and hides your message below your logo; we don't want colour screens, because when replying, we have to find another colour to reply in; we don't want PDF files, they are hard to get info out of for text editing; we don't want heavy formatting, each publication is different; we don't want pix embedded in the copy; we don't want info that is not relevant to our publication; we don't want to be spammed as part of your 500-strong media list; we don't want you to send more mails to find out if we got the first - ever heard of read receipts? We cannot tell you when we will use your press release - that is what media monitoring services are for - as we get so much information we battle to remember our own names, let alone what you sent us yesterday. And to end this rant, will Idea Lab (client: MTN) and Ochre Media (client: Sunday Times) which sent 9.9MB and 25MB mails respectively on Friday, please resend in plain text of less than 100KB as your mails were deleted unread at the server as they bombed my email! Enjoy! Louise Marsland, editor, editor@bizcommunity.co