This is an overdue follow-up to a previous post. In that post I looked at the security implications of email and how to protect the users from email security risks. This post is about:

Email Etiquette

Email is one of those business tools that is deemed intuitive enough that few companies consider employee training. Yet, newcomers and seasoned pros alike are often doing things that can drive the rest of us crazy.

There are a number of very extensive and useful lists on proper email etiquette on the web. I have found these two great blogs that discuss this topic:

27 email pet peeves that tick people off as much as spam, by Peggy Duncan.

Great tips for email, from the Business Writing blog by Lynn Gaertner-Johnston.

Here are my top-five pet peeves:

Blank or non-descriptive subject lines
People are sometimes in such a hurry that they forget to enter a subject line for their message – to err is human. Don’t be “trigger happy”.

The more common problem however, is that messages have non-descriptive subject lines such as: “follow-up”, “meeting minutes”, etc.; or carry-over subjects from past message threads that are now unrelated to the current discussion. More descriptive subjects greatly help in quickly identifying messages on arrival, but also when searching later. Consider this when typing your next email subject.

Reply-to-all
Think twice before using reply-to-all. Is your response really useful to all? Worse, you will look foolish when sending your lengthy meal preference to all employees as response to the invite for the company holiday party.

One-liners
One line Thank You’s and OK’s are frustrating and unnecessary. It is all right if you must confirm the receipt of a message, but consider picking up the phone or sending an IM instead. As a polite gesture, it is gratuitous and offset by the fact that you are clogging somebody’s inbox.

Address exposure
If you must include me in an email sent to a large group of people, please have the courtesy of using BCC rather than adding my name to an endless “to-list”. It will protect my privacy and prevent my email address from being exposed or possibly harvested by Spammers. Secondly, I will be shielded from unwelcome “reply-to-all” responses of the other recipients.

In the business context, this is a definite no-no. Mass mailings to your customers, while sometimes necessary should at least at some level attempt to give the impression of personalization. Rather than sending a generic message to all customers, use a professional mail merge program that will personalize the content and individually address the recipient. Never ever, use a lengthy “to-list”. You might as well publish your customer’s names and emails on the Internet.

BCC
Be careful what you are hiding. There is a time and place when it is appropriate to use bcc (see above); office politics is not one of them.

Technorati Tags: email etiquette, email overload, email best practice

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