All rules

Subject line empty or too long

email-subject-lengthon by defaultJapanese / English

A work email whose "Subject:" line is empty or longer than the limit

Example

Flagged
Subject: Following up on our conversation last week about the meeting room booking service and a visit Dear facilities team, I would like to visit your office. Best regards, Ichiro
What chaff prints
1:1 The subject has 93 characters (up to 70)
Fixed
Subject: Visit for the room booking service Dear facilities team, I would like to visit your office. Best regards, Ichiro
What chaff prints
no finding
chaff.yaml used for this example
genre: business/email

How to fix

Put only the request and a distinguishing word (a date, a project) in the subject, and move the explanation into the body.

Why it matters

Recipients decide from the subject whether to open a message and when. An empty subject says nothing and looks like spam; a long one is cut off in the inbox list before its key words. Only an email with a "Subject:" line is checked, and its value is counted in characters. The "Re:" and "Fwd:" a mail program adds are not counted.

What it does not flag

An email or letter without a "Subject:" line, and subjects inside a quoted reply, are not checked. When nothing follows the colon, the next line with text is read as the subject (a form that sets the label and the value in two columns), unless that line is a greeting, a sentence or another field. Only the email and letter genre runs this rule.

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: email-subject-length — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax email-subject-length --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules: email-subject-length: off
Technical details
Layer
L2
Status
stable
Severity
warning
Languages
Japanese and English
Suited to
business/email, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech

Levels

Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).

strictup to 50 characters in the subject
normalup to 70 characters in the subject
relaxedup to 90 characters in the subject

By genre

Runs by default in
business/email
Turned off by the genre in
legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript
Not suited to, and not run in
technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes

Genres

Message

The subject has {count} characters (up to {limit})

The subject line is empty

Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay

This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/email-subject-length.yaml