Email Etiquette: Look Like a Pro

Email Etiquette.. what is it?

It involves knowing how to communicate properly and professionally via email. This is especially important for business communications, but the home user can benefit from these suggestions as well.

Even if you are newbie email user, following these suggestions will go a long way towards giving an impression that you’re an internet pro.

Suggestions for Proper Email Etiquette:

1. Don’t type your emails using all capital letters. Using all caps is the same as YELLING in email land.

2. Know your attachment sizes: This is an especially important email etiquette tip!

   Check the size of your attachments before you send them. If they are over 200K in size, compress or zip the file, or resize it, if the file is a picture.

   This is usually a problem with digital camera pictures. Right out of the camera, most digital pictures are very large, usually over 1Mb.

   Use an editing program like Paint or Paint Shop Pro to cut them down to below 200K, or here’s an easier way: install Microsoft’s Image Resizer Power Toy.

   Then you can just right click on the picture and choose resize from the menu. You can get Image Resizer here.

   Sending an email that is over 600K in size makes the process harder for the person receiving it. They have to wait for all that data to download.

   If you send a file that big to person who only has dial-up (modem) based internet service, it will really clog up their email, and they will want to hurt you.

   Better yet, if you want to share digital pictures, upload them to a photo sharing website. Google offers free Picasa software, and a huge amount of server space for you to do just this, and it comes with an (also) free Google mail account. Take a look here.

3. Read your email, and check it for grammar, spelling and punctuation before you send it. Just because you are sending email doesn’t mean you can forget all about proper writing techniques. It’s just as difficult to read bad writing on a screen as it is in a book. Practice good writing along with good email etiquette.

4. Don’t forward chain letters. I know some of them say you’ll have 7 years of bad luck if you don’t send them on. Ignore this. Just delete it. It will help out so many people, and you'll be practicing really good email etiquette. :)

5. Leave the message thread on your reply. I personally find it annoying to get a reply back from someone without the message thread. Your message arrives and just says Yes. Yes? Yes to what? I send out lots of emails. How am I supposed to remember what we were talking about 6 days ago?

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6. If you are writing a long email, here’s some advice that will save your sanity. Write long emails in some other word editor like MS Word, or Works, or even a plain old text message window. Then when you are done, and it looks good, cut and paste it into an email message window.

   I can't count the number of times users have come to me with a story about how they were in the middle of long email when the computer froze or crashed. They then ask me if they can get the email back, and I hate having to tell them the bad news that all that work is gone, and they will have to start over.

   If you use another word editor, you can save your message as you write, and avoid losing it if the PC freezes, etc.. (This assumes that you periodically save a document that you are writing on a computer. "Periodically" means every time you make a large change you want to keep; you do, right?).

7. Keep your email format simple. No loud background, no funny colors, etc.. These additions makes it very difficult to read your email message; practice good email etiquette, and just leave the background white, please.

8. Don’t leave the subject line blank. This will cause the receiving ISP to target your email as spam, and your email may get deleted.

   Also, avoid using all caps, or short, general terms such as Hi, Help or Please Respond in the subject for the same reason.

9. If you are sending an email to a group of people who don’t know each other, put all of the email addresses in the “BCC” line of your message window, not the “To” line. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy, and it will keep each person from seeing all the other recipient addresses.

   NOT doing this opens up all the addresses in the email to someone who could grab and sell them to an spammer. VERY annoying and very bad email etiquette in internet land.

10. Never give out your phone number or other personal information without confirming you are communicating with a reputable party. Legitimate businesses will NEVER ask you for your credit card and bank account information via email. And never give out the personal contact information of others without their specific permission.

11. Don’t click on any email attachment, especially those with an .exe or .vbs or .com suffix (i.e, christmas.exe) without making sure that attachment has been checked for viruses. It could infect your PC, and you don't want the headaches that would cause you. Most reputable ISPs have virus checking turned on automatically.

    This holds true even if the email appears to come from someone you know. If the attachment is virus generated, it's capable of picking up your friend's email address off of another infected computer.

12. Set a rule for yourself about forwarding emails to your friends and family. If the subject isn’t interesting enough to print out, put in an envelope, and mail via the Post office, it probably isn’t interesting enough to send via email.

    If you do decide to forward an email that has already been forwarded several times, here's a nice thing to do:

    Click Forward on the email. On the new message window that opens, remove all the forwarding email address information from the beginning of the message, so that only the joke or actual message is left to send. The next person you forward it to will thank you because they won't have to scroll through all of that extra info to get to the actual message.

13. If you use email to market your business and track communications, you might want to look into SMTP services. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and there are services that will manage email campaigns for you. Check into what an smtp service is and what it can do for you.

Spam in Your Email?

Okay, so now that we know our email etiquette, here's a page with more information about email and spam.

If you get an email with some kind of dire warning in it, don't automatically assume it's true. Practice good email etiquette, and check to make sure it’s not a hoax before you send it on.

Here are the best places to check out an email hoax:

• Snopes.com: This is one of the best sites for checking whether any story is real or a hoax.

• McAfee’s Virus Hoax page: Check here if you get an email warning about a virus attack. And delete these hoax emails - they contain phony warnings only meant to frighten or mislead you.