Never use your company account for sending private / personal messages. If your company permits, use the freebie accounts like, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail etc... By doing this you really have your own privacy and will be less visible to your employers.
Properly understand To, CC, BCC. Use BCC when necessary. If you are sending an email to multiple people, add your own email id in To: field and put all other email addresses in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field. This will keep the email address of your friends private whom you have marked a copy.
Do not use BCC option for officially copying someone in the email, use CC (Carbon Copy) option in such cases.
Sometimes people use BCC option to let someone else know without the recipient's knowledge that you are writing this specific email. I feel this is not a good practice since a BCC'ed person may unknowingly reply to the email, while the initial recipient was not aware of this which later creates problems in relationships. It is instead advised to email the actual recipient and then forwarding the sent mail to whomever we want to let know about this, with a FYI (For Your Information) note. This sounds more professional.
Write a good subject line. Subject line should be short and to the point that reflects the content of the message. It is not a good idea to mention subject lines like, ‘Hi’ ‘hello’, etc... Instead put them to the point as follows:
Subject:
Meeting at Intercontinental on 25 Dec @ 6 PMSimilarly when we receive such mails, don’t use the same old format like,
Re: Meeting at Intercontinental on 25 Dec @ 6 PM and then confirming in the mail. With this we are making the recipient to open the mail and read whether you have confirmed it or not. Reply with subject line like this:
Subject:
Meeting at Intercontinental on 25 Dec @ 6 PM will be delayed till 6:30 PMDoing this, you have saved the time of the recipient.
Keep your email message short and to the point. Very few will have patience and time to read a whole story. Instead make them short and to the point and if it is really required to be lengthy with full details, at least highlight the specific words and sentences that needs more attention.
Delete all past forwarded email addresses. When you are forwarding some mail, nobody wants to keep going through the history of this mail how long it has travelled and reached how many inboxes. These simply clutter the message and finally the real message is found at the bottom. Keep it clean while forwarding. Let only the message remain!
Do not forward chain letters. I simply HATE this! Emails that say, if you don't forward it to 10 people you'll die. Who really cares! Cut off such superstitions... And even if you receive such mail, please do not forward the mails with the footer. Delete them and then forward. Well and if you really are sending some real decent mail which is suspected to be a chain mail, make a note at the top saying “Please note: This isn't a chain letter”
Mind your words at work. Ensure that your work emails does not contain
chat acronyms like 'u', 'ty', ‘wrt’, ‘neways’, ‘b4’, ‘tc’ etc... They are meant for cell phone messaging since the keypads are not well suited to writing fully-formed words, sentences and paragraphs. They sound a childish behaviour in Business mails. Always make a habit of writing in full words in general too instead of using acronyms.
Check your tone. Know your mail recipient well. Stay aware of your relationship – professionally before you start writing a mail. Re-verify your mail and if the topic is appropriate to write or not, as well as the tone of your writing.
Be careful. When you are sending some very secret and confidential mails, you better be very careful. Emails can be intercepted anywhere en route to its recipient. And also they can live for years in recipient email inbox. Think before sending!
Shorten your signature. Signature files, especially in business, should contain as few lines as possible. Four lines are more than enough. You may remove your personal mobile number and the home number if you are in a group mailing list. Keep them short and simple. Do not use very flashy, moving and colourful signatures. Do not use special symbol fonts in signature. They may also not be compatible with the recipients’ email client.
Name---
Title---
Quote past messages. It is always a better practice to cut the most relevant sentence from the message you received and preface it with a '>' and paste the quote above your response. Delete the rest of the original email from your response, unless you are responding to other points in the original.
Eg:
>Hey Ashwin, How are you? It’s been long time no mails from you!
Hi *** I am fine and was very busy for the past few weeks so could hardly get any time to even check my mails. So how are you doing?
Then the communication may continue with added quotes ‘>>’
Eg:
>>Hey Ashwin, How are you?
>>It’s been long time no mails from you!
>Hi *** I am fine and was very busy for the past few weeks so could hardly get any time to even check my mails.
>So how are you doing?
I am doing good and recently promoted as *** in my organization. With this new position, I now have the following responsibilities.....
Do not write email when you are in a bad mood. This reflects your style of writing.
Ask for clarification. If you receive and email that upsets you, make sure you haven't misunderstood. As told earlier, Mind your words and Check your tone... misunderstandings do happen due to such petty reasons. Therefore, instead of responding angrily, in your response, quote the portion of text that you are unsure of and ask the sender to clarify. Point out what you think it means, and then ask if you've misunderstood.
Do not spam friends, colleagues, etc... Do not send repeated mails as forwards. You may land up in the Spam Box of the recipients’ company mail server. It is always polite to apologize if you have done it.
Respond to group email appropriately. If someone has sent a group email that requires a response, but only to the sender or few other people, don't copy everyone on your reply. Read out what is specified and stay aware.
Check you File Attachment size. Do not send attachments with large size. Recipients have limitations to receiving the files and mailbox limits. Also note that everyone does not have a broadband connection. Therefore do not send large files unless requested. Else it is advised to upload them over websites like
Files-Upload,
YouSendIt,
SendMeFile etc... and for images, use services like
SnapFish,
PhotoBucket,
ImageStation,
ImageShack etc... Then send the link to download it. If there are more than 2 documents, zip in one file and send. This will ensure that no downloads are missed by the recipient. No messages being bounced back due to exceeded attachment size limits etc...
Always reply to emails especially the ones specifically addressed to you. You have the sender waiting for your reply.
Do not hit the Reply to All button unnecessarily. Say you have received a mail from your large organization that is actually marked company-wide to several users. You may feel the need to respond to the sender, but others definitely do not want to have it unless relevant. Therefore mark a copy to only those whom you feel are really associated with that message and needs to be kept informed. I have also seen this to personal mail forwards that spread rumours. People just mark a Reply to all saying that the mail is fake and there the discussion starts... Please get me out of this conversation. I have no interest into it.
DO NOT USE CAPITAL LETTERS. In Internet, this chat terminology is called as SHOUTING if you are typing in capitals. Therefore don’t yell at me. Please be polite.
No stationeries please. These days there are several services that provide cool and jazzy stationeries to make your mail more colourful. Please... if you want to use it, then please purchase a beautiful letter pad, write and snail mail me... I will appreciate you. It is really nice to see the creativity but not always for all mails. Once in a while is OK on some special occasions when you got to send out wishes. These simply increase the size of the mail and also few email clients that do not support HTML, will send them as attachment. It is better to stay off for the confusion of the recipient asking you what is the attachment all about.
Less smiley and emoticons please. It is very nice to see your smiling face in a mail format. (But over smiling turns me off at least). Use then the least. All those mail with most of :) :) :) look uglier for me!
Plain Text or HTML. If you are using HTML format, see that you do not over format you mail. Keep it simple silly (KISS). Just use them to highlight any specific sections that may need attention. And no various colours please. I am no colour blind and have learnt about them in childhood. So please do not show me the various colours. Also if the recipients email client does not support HTML, you mail will look gibberish and vague.
While using plain text format, you obviously cannot format them and the font is standard. It is in “Courier” and this keep the size of the file lesser.
Use simple words, do not make the recipient to use dictionary! Write emails in the language easily understood by the recipient. There is always a difference when you are writing to an ordinary person, Senior Manager, Vice president or Chief Executive, Management etc... No jargons please to show your knowledge.
Do not overuse the high priority and privacy options of email.
Do not always request a Read Receipt. If the email is not delivered, we anyways receive a notification from the SMTP server, about delivery failure. And when email is previewed or just displayed in the recipient’s screen, the read receipt is sent. This also does not guarantee that the email is read by the recipient. But no worries, your message always gets delivered.
Spell Check. Always check your spellings before you send the mail.
I will soon come up with few more updates...
