E-mail Ettiquette

We recently posted an article about essential e-mail ettiquette:

http://techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=510

What are your pet peeves about e-mail? What would you consider essential e-mail ettiquette?

Thanks for the informative article. I agree that e-mail messages should be kept brief and to the point.

A few e-mail pet peeves of my own:

[ulist]• Poor use of spelling, grammar or style. This includes e-mail written out completely in small caps or in capital letters, or as one big paragraph. This creates the impression the sender is an unskilled amateur. There is simply no excuse for badly written e-mail.

• No e-mail subject line. I also receive the occasional e-mail with a subject line that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual message. It's always helpful to include a brief subject line with each e-mail that tells the reader what your message is about.

• Sending large attachments without first notifying the recipient. This might cause a problem particularly in the case of a recipient who uses a standard Web-based e-mail account (like Hotmail or Yahoo) which is full or getting close to the maximum size limit. Consequently, the attachment might not be successfully received. (In which case the message typically bounces back to the sender with a delivery-failure notification.)[/ulist]
Here's another related article on e-mail etiquette by Kim Komando:

8 E-mail Mistakes That Make You Look Bad
http://www.bcentral.ca/articles/komando/115.asp


Yann

I'd like to underscore Wenkai Tai's suggestion that you use the "Bcc" line when you address a message to people who are strangers to each other. It drives me nuts when people send a message to a large number of recipients, and include all of the email addresses in the "To:" line. There are three problems with this:

1. An email with 80 addresses in the header looks really unprofessional;

2. I don't want 79 other strangers to know my email address; and

3. Anybody can respond to the original message by hitting "Reply All," thereby spamming all 80 of us over and over again.

This last point is especially frustrating -- more than once, a well-meaning friend has sent me a message like this with dozens of other names in the "To:" line. Somebody has something to say about the original message, so they hit "Reply All." Somebody else disagrees with this second message, so *they* hit "Reply All." The next thing I know, I'm engaged in an email debate that I didn't ask to be part of, among people I don't know, and with no way to make it stop.

If you have to send email to lots of people on a regular basis, the best thing to do is set up a listserv that your recipents can opt out of if they don't want the mail.

But sometimes you really do need to send a message to a large, ad hoc list of people, and "Bcc:", which stands for "blind carbon copy," is definitely the way to go. Everyone in the "Bcc:" line will be sent your message, but none of their addresses will be visible. It's a simple and polite way to protect everyone's privacy and sanity.

Bcc! Live it! Love it! Use it!

Kevin

My pet peeve is the meaningless Subject field. To me, the Subject is a preview of what's to come; it helps me decide which messages should be read immediately and which can wait. I find it especially annoying when the Subject is something like, "I think I will . . ." I'm being baited to open the message just to complete the sentence!

HTML (and even Rich Text) email is a no-no in my book. Nobody cares to see a cursive signature line or an obnoxious background graphic. Many people, because of spam mostly, have disabled HTML email entirely and simply view all email in plain text mode. It defeats the spam problem quite nicely. =)

-- Richard Barnet

Pet peeves:

1. Spam, spam and spam.
2. Irrelevant copies-- if you want me to have a copy for my files, put "FYI" in the subject line so I know I just need to file it in case a need may arise.
3. Messages re-forwarded from email programs that put the new message at the bottom-- so I have to scroll through to find the message someone thought I needed. If you are using this kind of program, delete the prior messages.

Did I mention spam?

My huge pet peeve, and one that happens far too frequently, is the unnecessary and extensive use of ALL CAPS (shouting) and the double red flag, signifying urgency. Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? Emergencies are often not as urgent to others as they seem to you at that moment. Abusing the double red flag renders it useless.

Just to name a few...