EMAIL ETTIQUETTE

BE CAREFUL:

• Email is not private.
• With the amount of backups, records, copies, and computers your email has gone through to reach its destination, you should assume someone other than the intended reader is reading your email.
• Good rule of thumb: “Don’t write anything in an email that you wouldn’t feeling comfortable posting for everyone to see.”

Be Explicit and Concise:

• Email messages have no audio, so what ever is said will be read the way the reader interprets it.  Avoid tone, hidden meaning, levity, and especially sarcasm. These can all be misinterpreted. Your emails should be explicit and too the point.
• People receive several emails every day (or hour) and therefore cannot spend a great amount of time concentrating on one email.  Your emails should short and concise – be frugal with your words.  Keep your emails to less than three paragraphs with each paragraph containing no more than four sentences.
• Don’t say what doesn’t need to be said.

 Use capitals and punctuation SPARINGLY!?!:

• CAPITAL letters (as well as bold, underline, and italic) in email are equivalent to shouting or putting HEAVY emphasis and therefore should be reserved for extremely important messages.
• Excess punctuation provides an added sense of urgency and tone that creates unease for the reader.  Use standard English punctuation, avoiding ! and ???

Appropriate Subject line:

• The subject line should be a short descriptive phrase (less than 10 words) describing the contents of the email.  It’s considered impolite to use a) no subject, b) “hi”, “hello”, etc. or  c) a misleading subject.

Be careful with attachments:

• Limit the size of your attachments.  Attachments should never be more than 1 MB and preferably less than 300 KB
• Describe the attachment in the body of the email.  That way the reader will know what s/he is receiving and won’t assume it is a virus.
• Avoid sending attaching with the following suffixes: .pif, .zip, .exe, .com, .vbs, .bat, .scr, .reg, .dll

Checking your email:

• Make sure to check your email at least once a day

Replying to email:

• You should reply to emails immediately.  If you need time to formulate an appropriate response to an email, reply to the email immediately with “I have received your email.  I will respond soon.”
• Avoid replying to all.  It is impolite to reply all when others don’t need to see your response.