Email Etiquette

The 7 tips outlined here will lead you to more courteous communication when you send email messages.

• 1. Use a short, descriptive subject line.  Use words that will describe the general purpose of your e-mail.
  
  
• 2. ONE OF THE BIGGEST MISTAKES PEOPLE MAKE IS TYPING THEIR MESSAGE IN ALL-CAPS.  It's okay to use all-caps for headings or titles in your messages, or even to EMPHASIZE certain words.  Anything beyond that is equivalent to shouting at someone.
  
  
• 3. Respect people's privacy. When sending a message to multiple recipients, put all the addresses in the "BCC: field" (blind carbon copy) separated with semi-colons. This way each recipient will only be able to see his/her own e-mail address.
  
  
• 4. Use blank lines (hard carriage returns) to separate your paragraphs. In most emails, paragraphs are not indented because different e-mail programs can show tab stops differently onscreen. If you need to indent something, use the space-bar.
  
  
• 5. While e-mail might be viewed as an informal means of communication, your composition skills are still quite reflective of your knowledge and abilities.  A few typos are acceptable, but if you are consistently spelling words incorrectly, using bad grammar and so on, you risk being thought of as a less than intelligent person.
  
  
• 6. Nobody likes reading run-on sentences because they're not very easy to read, and besides, readers' brains might get tired of thinking about the words by the time their eyes finish with the sentence a few minutes later before having to move on to the next sentence, which might be part of a bigger paragraph that seems to be lumped together without any signs of visible separation.
  
  
• 7.  When sending large attachments, get approval from the recipient first.  If they have a slower connection it could take an extremely long time to download. And if their mail box is near its capacity, large attachments can overload it and keep them from receiving other e-mail messages