e-mail etiquette for the 21st Century

Dear friends and clients,

e-mail has become the medium of choice when it comes to written communication in our day and age. But many people fail to use e-mail effectively, or send messages that can be incorrectly interpreted as lacking, off-putting or downright rude to the person receiving them. Obviously, I’m discussing person-to-person e-mail here, not mass-marketing or advertising e-mail. Like it or not, your e-mail is a representative of you. It carries your message, and is your emissary – and YOU will be judged by its impact.

We were never taught in school how to do e-mail. Protocol is significantly different from mere letter-writing skills. Below are a few simple guidelines that should ensure happy and effective communication between you and your e-mail correspondents. Use these as a rule, and never risk inadvertently sending the ‘wrong’ message again: 

• Use a greeting – it sets the tone and makes it clear that the sender is addressing a person (or a group.) Just launching into your message without a greeting can appear brusque and abrupt.

• Use a relevant subject line. This is crucial to effective communication. It makes life so much simpler when you can see at a glance what the sender is writing to you about, and also make replies to mails easier to deal with. If you are replying to a message without a relevant subject line, fill it in yourself. There is nothing more annoying than seeing a mail whose subject is only “Re:”

• Include original messages with your reply when appropriate. It makes it much easier for the person reading the message to be able to refer to what they originally said in the mail to which you are replying.

• Start a new message for a new topic. It is extremely annoying to receive an e-mail containing reams of historical information that has nothing to do with the subject under discussion. This often happens when people are too lazy to start a new message with a new topic, and instead just reply to an old message.

• Forward! – If you have to forward e-mails, remove all the irrelevant bumf from previous forwarders. How often have you received an e-mail with lines and lines of old forwarders’ addresses and signatures, and just a couple of relevant message lines at the bottom?

• Address – When sending to multiple recipients, add addresses with the ‘Bcc:’ field rather than the ‘To:’ field – This hides them from the recipients, who would otherwise see every address to which the mail was sent.

• Check! It’s surprising how many e-mails contain glaring spelling or grammatical mistakes that easily could have been avoided simply by letting the spellchecker do its work! Sloppy checking reflects poorly on the sender.

• Respond! Always respond to e-mails that you may receive, unless they are mailshots or obviously sent to a mass audience. It is a common courtesy to let your correspondents know their mails have been received and read, even if you have no specific reply.

• Don’t capitalise – Capitals in an e-mail message or chat are seen as SHOUTING – bad form.

• Attachments – Use care when sending attachments. While it is easy enough to bung on a few family photos or a funny movie, not everybody has fast internet connections, and large attachments can block a recipient’s mail queue or cost them in connection time. Become familiar with the concepts of resizing photographs, and always check the size of your attachments before sending. More than 1Mb may cause problems.

• Use a signature. Sending mail without a signature (it can be as simple as you like) is a no-no. Outlook supports two types of signature – One for new messages, which is usually more elaborate and complete, sometimes including a company logo, etc., and another for replies and forwards, which can be much simpler and briefer. However, in a long conversation (or thread) the signatures can be omitted after the initial exchange.

When all is said and done – What would we do without e-mail? Let’s do it right ! If you have any thoughts on the topic, send a mail to ken@synergies.co.za