Email etiquette
Due to the ever growing usage of the internet, email has become a standard way of communicating with friends, family and business contacts. In business, the formality of email messages tends to vary, between the semi-formal approach that was previously the domain of the inter-office memo, down to chatty exchanges that you might have with someone over the telephone or while standing next to the coffee machine.
It needs to be understood email messages are permanent records. Have a really good look through the contents of your mailbox and you might be surprised to see just how old some messages are. Most people give very little thought to the contents of an email message, even though it might linger around for several years.
It can be normal email messages that include offhand remarks and unguarded comments, thoughtless turns of phrase and careless wording. Care must be taken both when sending an email message, and, perhaps more importantly, when reading it. Try not to be too harsh if there's a chance that you might have misinterpreted the sender's meaning. Unlike conversation, email may have missed signals - the written message doesn't come with facial expressions or gestures that you would get in a face-to-face meeting, and there's no tone of voice to interpret as you could over the telephone. A great deal of human communication comes from non-verbal signals and traditionally they help to make the message more clear. For example, irony and humor can be difficult to express in a mail message - many people get round this by using smiley's such as :) to indicate humor - but not everyone knows what these mean, so they are not foolproof.
The following tips should help you avoid some of the pitfalls and practice -
Good Email Etiquette:
- Do try to think about the message content before you send it out.
- Do make sure that the content is relevant to the recipients. Nobody likes to receive junk email.
- Do be polite. Terseness can be misinterpreted.
- Do trim any quoted message down as much as possible.
- Do try to use humor and irony sparingly. You can use smiley's such as :) or :( to indicate facial expressions, but make sure that the recipient understands what they mean.
- Do ensure that you have a relevant "Subject" line.
- Do try to quote from the original message where relevant. You can break the quoted message down into paragraphs and comment on them individually to make it clearer.
- Do be patient, especially with inexperienced email users. Give people the benefit of the doubt - just because you are familiar with email etiquette, it doesn't mean that they are.
- Do include a brief signature on your email messages to help the recipient understand who it is from, especially if you are dealing with someone you do not know very well.
- Do be careful when replying to mailing list messages, or to messages sent to many recipients. Are you sure you want to reply to the whole list?
- Do remember to delete anything that isn't needed or is trivial.
- Don't reply to an email message when angry , as you may regret it later. Once the message has been sent, you will not be able to recover it.
- Don't keep mail longer than necessary, especially if it has large attachments.
- Don't copy out an entire, long message just to add a line or two of text such as "I agree".
- Don't type in CAPITALS as this is considered to be SHOUTING. This is one of the rudest things you can do.
- Don't over-use punctuation such as exclamation marks ("!") as these are meant to be for emphasis. In particular avoid more than one exclamation mark ("!!"), especially if your email is quite formal. Also, over-use of the full-stop (e.g. "....") can make a message difficult to read.
- Don't send irrelevant messages, especially to mailing lists or newsgroups.
- Don't send large attachments without checking with the recipient first. Many systems will reject attachments in excess of a certain size.
- Don't send excessive multiple postings to people who have no interest. This is known as "spamming" and is considered to be ignorant, and may lead to serious trouble with your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
- Don't send chain letters or "make money fast" messages. There are more often than not a hoax that may contain viruses, malware or trojan horse infections - never pass these on.
- Don't criticize people's spelling, it is considered petty. Many people have no way of running a spell check on their messages and will make typos. Not all nationalities spell words in the same way.
- Don't conduct arguments in public, for example on a mailing list.
- Don't "flame" people by sending them abusive email messages.
- Don't make personal remarks about third parties. Email messages can come back to haunt you.
- Don't send unsuitable email or attachments, especially anything of a sexual nature as they may well be found by a third party later.
- Don't mark things as urgent if they aren't, because then when you really do have an urgent message it may not be treated in the way it deserves.
- Don't post your email address on web sites and other public parts of the Internet unless you want to be deluged with spam.
