Five things I wish everyone knew about email

• April 30th, 2010

Seth has a great list of eight things for email etiquette; I have reduced his eight to five. His eight are great, and I based my five on his list, but I’d be content with just the following five things that I wish everyone knew about email:

  • Change your settings so that email from you has a name, your name.
  • Change your settings so that when you reply to a note, the note you’re replying to is included below what you write (this is called quoting).
  • Don’t hit reply all. Just don’t.
  • Email lives forever, is easy to spread and can easily show up in discovery for a lawsuit.
  • Use a professional signature, with your direct contact information. Please don’t ask me to save a tree by not printing your email. It doesn’t work, it just annoys the trees.

Now

Send yourself some email at a friend’s computer. Read it. Are the fonts too big or too small? Does it look like a standard email? If it doesn’t look like a standard, does this deviation help you or hurt you? Sometimes, fitting in makes sense, no?

If you are unsure about any of the above, contact your friendly enginerd or web technologist to assist you.

More on personal email etiquette

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