E-Mail Etiquette

September 20 by | 3 comments | Communication, Lifehack | Tags: , , ,

I will Follow… has a really good guideline on E-Mail Usage and Etiquette. You may know some of the key points in there, but some tips may be the wake up call for you on how to use email properly. It has contents about how to use to, cc, bcc fields, how to format your email, and so on. In relation to time, the author also talks the natural of email responses – Email is not an interaction communication tool and you cannot expect to have your reply quickly. This is one of the trade-off to avoid interruption to others and help people to concentrate their work:

… E-mail is a conversation that does not require an immediate response (like a telephone). If someone calls you on the telephone, you pick it up (unless you have an answering machine, voice mail or you are just plain rude) and the conversation begins. This is an interactive conversation.

With e-mail you send a message and then wait for a response. The response may come in five minutes or the response may come in five days. Either way it’s not an interactive conversation …

Here are the overall topics:

  • To, Cc and Bcc
  • Reply To All
  • Don’t Be A Novelist
  • Too Much Punctuation!!!
  • Formatting Is Not Everything
  • Abbreviations
  • Smilies
  • Salutations
  • Signatures
  • Attachments
  • vCards
  • Threads
  • Quotes
  • Save A Tree
  • Privacy, Are You Kidding?
  • If You Send It From the Office, It Comes From The Office
  • Flames
  • Better Than Snail Mail
  • A Blessing And A Curse

E-Mail Etiquette

  • http://www.mikemontalvo.com Mike M

    Mostly good stuff, especially about not using vCards. I hate them. But I completely disagree with:

    >use of the ‘Bcc’ is somewhat unethical and therefore its use is discouraged.

    I don’t want my email addresses strewn across computers of people I do not know. For one, lots of people automatically add emails to their contacts. So those people that say “let me forward this to my whole contact list” start sending me unwanted email. And when this user gets a mail worm, guess who gets a ton of virus infected email? I always encourage the used of BCC because I don’t want to have my private email forwarded all over the place. I don’t see how it’s unethical at all.

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