When to send an email

Email is an extremely useful communication medium that has become overwhelmingly popular in this day and age. But, when to send an email? Generally, you'll want to send an email when:

• You want to communicate information to large numbers of people.
• You want a written record of communications.
• You cannot reach someone on the phone and have more information to give than is comfortable to leave on their voice mail/answering machine.
• You are communicating with someone who you have established an "email" relationship with, such as a distant friend.

Avoid email when:

• You need an immediate reply.
• The conversation will require a lot of back and forth communication - a direct phone call or conference call may be much better.
• The communication should be kept private (see below).
• You want guaranteed delivery - use certified mail for this. Email can be lost or spoofed.
• You want to express deep feelings. A written letter is much more "special".

Be sure to reply to an email as soon as possible. In this day and age, 24 hours (or one business day, for work emails) is the longest any email should sit. To help you get through your emails quicker, try to reply to them right away. Any you absolutely must wait on should be left open or filed somewhere you will actually follow up with. As another option, Microsoft Outlook includes a "flag" feature which can set you a reminder for when a reply is due.

What to write

First, include a good subject line. Make sure it contains clear information about what you are communicating. For example, if you are communicating about a construction project, don't simply have a subject of "construction" or even "construction project", make your subject "Building X construction project".

Make your emails as short and to the point as possible. Many people these days receive upwards of 100 emails a day and don't really want to spend a lot of time reading unnecessary details. Make your point quickly, and use bullet points whenever possible if there is a large amount of information to get across. If absolutely necessary, you can include further information at the bottom for those who need it.

Be sure to answer all of the questions in an email you are replying to. It's easy to answer one or two, and forget about the others included.

Do you need salutations (greetings) and valedictions (goodbyes)? This is different depending on the culture. Generally, you need to include these for formal communications outside your company. Inside your company, it depends on if it is to someone you communicate with frequently or not. If it's someone you frequently communicate with, it's considered standard practice to not waste time with greetings, especially with peers. A simple thanks at the end of the email is usually enough of a goodbye. With friends and family it's similar. People you email with frequently generally won't care about these things. Someone new to, or an infrequent emailer, may feel you are being short or terse with them if you don't include these things. You really need to judge it on a case by case basis. When in doubt, just include them.

Since humans communicate a huge amount of information non-verbally, it can be tough to use sarcasm or joke around in an email. Make sure you think about how what you write will be misinterpreted (I use the term "will" on purpose). In social emails, you can attempt to indicate you are joking about something with the use of emoticons (smilies). By far the most common of these is a simple smiley face:

:-)

:)

Tilt your head to the left and you'll see the smile. You can use a semi-colon instead of a colon to get a "winking" effect. Any other emoticons should be avoided except by advanced users - you know who you are. Emoticons generally aren't considered professional and should be avoided in business communications.

Some items to avoid in your communication are:

• Typing in all capitals - this is considered shouting in the world of email. Reserve capitals for putting emphasis on words.
• Read receipts on all of your emails - it's annoying to think that someone wants to keep tabs on when I read all their emails. It also doesn't work with many email clients, and is often blocked by those that do. Save Read Receipts for important internal communications that must get to everyone, such as updating a group of employees on a rule change.
• Unnecessarily pointing out the importance of your email. Don't flag it with high importance, or write "URGENT!!!" in the subject line, unless it really is extremely important. Generally, the recipient should think your email to them is important simply because you took the time to write it.
• Abbreviations that are not common, such as FYI. If necessary, you can define an abbreviation the first time you use it

Last, make sure you re-read your emails before clicking send. This will make sure what you wrote makes sense, and can help catch some embarrassing misspellings that may slip by your spell checker, if you use one (recommended).

Who to include in an email

Make sure only the relevant people are getting your email. The To: line should include those the message is intended for directly. The CC: line (Carbon Copy) should include those who need to be kept in the loop, but are not the direct recipient - limit this to the essentials. The BCC: line (Blind Carbon Copy) should be used for one of two reasons: if you are sending an email to a large group, who do not need to reply with each other, use the BCC: field to avoid displaying all the email addresses to everyone; or to keep someone in the loop, whom you may not want the recipient to know you are showing this to (be sure to consider the ethics of this).

By all means, avoid the common mistake of hitting the Reply All button to every email. If a large group was sent an email concerning availability for a meeting, just send a reply to the original sender. Do not include everyone else in the email. Only use the Reply All if you are sharing information with the original sender that is needed by the rest of the group.

If you are going to Reply All, be sure to include the previous content in the discussion. That way, someone late to the conversation can simply scroll through the previous conversation in the latest email, as opposed to having to go back and open each individual email.

Formatting

Try not to get fancy when composing an email. Do not include backgrounds or the special "stationary" templates you found in Outlook - they are distracting and generally considered unprofessional, and will not always appear correctly for all recipients.

When your email is formatted, you have three choices: plain text, HTML, or Microsoft's "Rich Text". In general, stick with the plain text format. This will ensure that your email will look the same to your recipients as it does to you while you compose it. If you absolutely need some special formatting (bullet points, bold text, etc.), use the HTML format, but understand that some of your recipients may not have email clients capable of viewing it correctly. If you are emailing within a group who all use Outlook, such as all your coworkers, then you can choose Rich Text or HTML. In Outlook, you can choose your default formatting under Tools->Options, and click the Mail Format tab. One nice feature is the ability to select different formatting for internet recipients, versus recipients on the same mail server as you (usually coworkers).

What to forward

Perhaps you have a group you like to forward jokes or amusing anecdotes to. That's fine, it's up to you. But, in general you'll want to avoid forwarding large video or picture files. Watch for a size listing on attached files. Usually it is a number followed by a letter - b stands for bytes and is always OK; K stands for Kilobytes - more than 100K is too big, and M stands for Megabytes - you really shouldn't forward anything this large without a good reason. If you know all of your recipients are on broadband (cable, DSL, or work email), you can send larger files, but over 1M a piece is probably too large. Another thing to think about is that video files have the potential to embed a virus, so you may be exposing people to a risk if you do not know the origin of a particular file.

Unless you are your company's security specialist, avoid forwarding any virus or other warnings. Do to the high number of hoaxes out there, this is NOT the way the government, software manufacturers, or other companies spread the message about security threats, except on specialized security mailing lists. Also avoid chain letters, or any information about how to make money. These are almost certainly hoaxes or simply untrue.

Content to avoid

Avoid forwarding other people's discussions or attachments, without their specific permissions. A lot of trouble has occurred because something was written for one person's eyes, and was mistakenly or ignorantly sent to someone else who took offense from it.

On the flip side of that, do not include any information you would not like the world to see. For one thing, email is generally not a secure medium, so company confidential information should generally not be sent over the internet (internally in your company is usually OK). Plus, as noted above, people may forget what is still in the email 8 replies ago, and forward it on to someone else, who may not like what was said before. And of course, if situations change, you may not want something you stated put in writing. A good rule of thumb is - no email is ever private. Definitely avoid anything offensive, racist, libelous, or defamatory - the courts are full of case histories of companies that have paid out huge penalties because of one person's thoughtless moment.

Hopefully, this advice will help make your email communications more effective and enjoyable, for yourself and you recipients.

Summary:

• Reply promptly to all your emails.
• Be brief - summarize and bullet point - and include a good subject.
• Compose your email for your audience - be social and light hearted with friends, but keep your business emails serious and to the point.
• Include only those who truly need to see your email - avoid doing a Reply All unless there is a good reason.
• Don't forward warnings or money making ventures.
• Email is not private - never include in an email something you wouldn't want read to your mother, your boss, or a judge.