Email Etiquette: Choosing the Good and Avoiding the Bad

        Have you ever
received an email that just did not seem right?  The email wasn’t
spam or contained a virus, and it was from someone you knew.  You
could tell, however, that there was something odd about the email.  It was
poorly written.  Your email correspondent probably broke an Email
Etiquette rule.  Here we list a few guidelines for writing emails.

        Take the time someday to go
through old letters that your parents, grandparents, or
great-grandparents may have saved.  You might be surprised at the
eloquence of the letters and the effectiveness used in communicating
ideas.

        Listed below are a few Rules
of Email Etiquette defined to help us create improved communication
through email and to eliminate some abuses of the medium.

Attachments

• Avoid opening attachments from senders you are not
  familiar with, or from senders you are familiar with, but the content
  of the email looks suspicious.  Many viruses are spread by opening
  an email attachment that has a virus.  The virus can then search
  your address book, send emails to your friends with the infectious
  file, and then make the email look like it came from you!
• Never send a word document as an attachment if the
  content could be easily placed within the body of the email.
• Avoid sending large attachments.  Pictures
  from your digital camera are too large for many people to receive as
  attachments.  After receiving a few large pictures their email mailbox can
  fill up which in many cases will cause the recipient to not receive any
  more emails until your large email has been deleted.  Be courteous and
  resize your pictures unless you know the recipient has space or has
  requested the larger size image.

Composition

• Incorrect spelling is a wide-spread problem when it comes to
  email.  Use a spell checker to check your emails before you send
  them.
• Read through your email at least once to correct any punctuation errors and to improve the content.
• Do not overload the recipient with acronyms.  Leave acronyms
  for instant messaging programs, not emails.  Acronyms such as IMO
  (In My Humble Opinion) and LOL (Laugh Out Loud) should not be included
  in emails.
• Avoid using emoticons.  Emoticons are the familiar smiles
  and winks that can be composed from semicolons and parenthesis such as because they do not enhance the quality of your message. 
  Use words to express your feelings in an email and leave the emoticons
  to instant messaging.
• Avoiding composing emails in HTML which means avoid lots of
  content formatting, inserting pictures within the body of the email,
  etc.  Many email clients block pictures that have been embedded in
  emails or that link to a website.
• When writing long emails, break up the content into smaller paragraphs, or even try typing a heading before each paragraph.

Forwarding

• Do not pass around petitions, fraud warnings, and get rich
  forwarding schemes.  Your intelligence is reflected by the emails
  you send out and forward on to others.  People will think less of
  you if you are part of an email forwarding chain.
• Sometimes an associate will ask you to request something of
  another person, do not simply forward the email that was sent to
  you!  The reason why the sender contacted you first was so that
  you could ask the person.
•  Be aware that others may not follow the rules and will
  forward your emails on to other people.  Be very careful about
  sending sensitive information in an email because your recipient could
  purposefully or accidentally forward the information on to someone else.
• If you have received an email from someone, that you absolutely
  have to forward to a friend (say a link to a funny website), copy out
  the link from the email, and then send a new email to your friend.

Security

• When sending one email to many different recipients, do not place all the
  email addresses in the To: or Cc: fields.  The reason why is
  because you have just let out a portion of your email address
  book.  Some of your recipients may purposefully or by accident
  make inappropriate use of those emails.  Many people do not like
  their email address broadcasted to everyone else.  A better way to
  format a mass email (if you have to send one) is to put your own
  address in the To: field and enter all the rest in the Bcc: field which
  stands for Blind Carbon Copy.  Each of your recipients will
  receive the email, but they will not be able to tell who else the email was
  sent to besides you the sender.  Following this rule exhibits a
  high level of courtesy to others.
• Make sure that your computer is up-to-date with virus protection
  and security updates.  The last thing you want is for spam emails
  to be sent from your computer and you will be infected if you do not have the updates installed on your computer!
•  Avoid opening emails that look suspicious, and do
  not open spam messages.  If you do not have the proper security
  enabled on your email client program, the sender can know when you open
  one of their emails, and what do you think that will mean?  Spam
  would not be sent if it were not a profitable business.  Don’t
  help them out by opening their emails or by clicking on their ads!
•  Be careful what you type in an email because unless you
  have the proper setup (with a security certificate) your email can be
  intercepted and read over the internet.  Be especially cautious
  when you are connected to a wireless network.  If your email client does not maintain
  an encrypted connection with the email server, anyone on your wireless
  network could read your emails.

Subjects

• The subject of the email should identify what the purpose of the
  email is.  Subjects with one word such as “Hi” are often deleted
  because many spammers use that subject line, and if the recipient
  doesn’t recognize your email address, he or she may think your message
  is spam.

•  Do not reply back to an email with content that is
  not related to the previous email.  Many people have email
  accounts
  that organize emails by subject as well as by date.  If you reply
  to
  an email only because you didn’t want to have to create a new email,
  you’ve broken one of the etiquette rules and have made it difficult for
  others to find your email content in the future because the subject
  does not
  match up with the message of your email.

         As you compose better
emails, those who receive your emails will be more inclined to improve
their standards for email communication as well.