Business Email Etiquette

Do not send someone a big file (over 150k) unless you ask them first. The other day, someone emailed me a 2 megabyte file. It took 15 minutes to download, and when I got it, I realized that it was something that I did not need or want. 

For general practice, if you send an attachment, be sure that it is a small file. You may have the capacity to send and receive very large files, but not everyone does. Large attachments may keep recipient  from receiving any further mail. As a general guideline, only send attachments under 5 MB and closer to 20 to 100 KB. Email them the URL instead of the file whenever possible. If it is event-related, just type the event, place, time, date, and point of contact instead of a sending them a huge PowerPoint slide.

When you send an attachment, explain what it is. A blank message with an attachment most likely contains an email virus and will likely get automatically deleted by savvier users and their email programs. Every good secretary knows the three proper words "Enclosed please find..." that are included in a memorandum that has attachments.

If you are sending some proprietary file to the recipient, be sure the recipient has the same version of that program or compatible program to open it. Say for example, not everyone uses Windows or Microsoft Word/PowerPoint all the time. If you are sending a word document files, be sure the recipient has the same version of that program. Do not send email in HTML or other non-plain text format unless you know for sure that the other person’s email reader is capable of formatting the message properly. 

If you want to mail a large number of people (for instance, on a mailing list) don't paste all the names into the "CC" field of your email program. If you do that, all the people you are writing to will be able to see the email addresses of all the other people. This can be very annoying as people usually don't like to disclose their email address in public. Always use "BCC" (blind carbon copy) instead. That way, each person will only see their own email address on your message.

Do not "quote" entire previous messages:

Avoid too Much Punctuation

Don't get caught up in grammar and punctuation, especially excessive punctuation. You'll see lots of e-mail messages where people put a dozen exclamation points at the end of a sentence for added emphasis. Big deal. Exclamation points (called "bangs" in computer circles) are just another form of ending a sentence.

If something is important it should be reflected in your text, not in your punctuation.

Formatting Is Not Everything

Formatting can be everything, but not here. Plain text is it. Period. End of sentence.

Using HTML, or heaven forbid the Rich Text Format, to format messages so that they have fancy fonts, colors or whatever is asking for trouble. There are lots of e-mail clients (and some servers) which can not handle messages in these formats. The message will come in as utter gibberish or in the worst case, crash the e-mail client. I've seen it happen.

Salutations

The question here is "How personal is too personal?" or to be more specific, how do you open your e-mail: "Dear Sir", "Dear Mr. Smith", "Joe" or none of the afore-mentioned.

In the business situation, things are much more complicated. Each situation will need to be evaluated on its on, but in general, as a guide: If you normally address a person as Miss/Mrs./Ms./Mr. Smith then that's the way I would initially address them in e-mail. If you normally call them by their first name then I would either omit the salutation or follow the guideline specified in the prior paragraph. If you are unsure, stick to the formal salutation. It's the safest bet.

Threads

Once you send that first e-mail, you will probably get a response. If you want to reply to that response what should you do? The wrong thing to do is to start a new e-mail message. This breaks the link (called a "thread") between the original message and your soon-to-be-created response. Without the link, it can get difficult for the users on each end to follow the sequence of messages, especially after several exchanges. This becomes an even larger problem when you are dealing with newsgroups (more later) where several people may be replying to messages and trying to follow the thread of exchanged information. The correct thing to do is to reply, which is essentially the same thing as creating a new message, but maintains the thread.

Save A Tree

Sometimes I think that the best thing that could happen would be for someone to take away the printer. Why? Every time I send an e-mail out to a large group, a third of the group will print the message even before reading it, a third will read it and then print it, and the last third will simply delete it.

One of the goals for e-mail usage is to eliminate (or greatly reduce) the shuffling of paper, but what chance does that have if a significant number of people are going to print every message they receive. I'm not saying that all messages should not be printed. I'm saying that too many messages are printed for no reason (a lot are printed and never retrieved from the printer).

Unless you have a very primitive e-mail system, it probably has some system (usually called "folders") that can be used to permanently store messages for recall at any time in the future. If the same people who print messages for paper file systems would create the same structure in the e-mail system with folders, it would accomplish the same goal, but would save an enormous amount of paper (and trees).

Use of upper-case words is the equivalent of shouting in some one's ear. ONLY use upper-case words when trying to make a point (such as I just did). Even at that, you should be careful with who you are exchanging messages.

Which email would you read first: "Case Update," or "Our Million Dollar Case Settled Today!?"

Most people spend only a few seconds reading each email message. Make your messages short and to the point. Put important information first. If you have to cover several topics in one email message, split your message up into several smaller messages.