Email Etiquette

Posted by John on February 22, 2009

We used to have a client who always writes in ALL CAPS in his email requests to us. I wonder if he was too lazy to use the shift key to properly perform sentence caps or he doesn’t know how to de-activate his Caps Lock. It seemed as if he was shouting a command at us. I felt that it was really rude and annoying while he sincerely doesn’t realise it.

It prompted me to want to write this post to cover some other poor email ettiquette that I have personally encountered.

1. Not compressing large files and sending large attachments. I consider anything more than 3MB large. We all have loads of email to download and these huge emails clog up the traffic which happens to be also carrying several other important emails from other senders. I ever received a 15MB monster email, needless to say, the download never got till the end, I went my webmail interface to check on the header of the email and deleted it off. Try using YouSendIt instead if you need to send large files to your recipients.

2. Flagging every other email as high priority. The subject headers and message body would usually be preceded by an “URGENT” or “IMPORTANT” too. Remember the boy who cried wolf? After some time, we all tend to disregard any high priority request coming from this sender.  Come on, if it’s high priority all the time, this guy’s probably lacking in his personal organisation skills. Only use the high priority flag and “urgent” words when absolutely necessary.

3. Adding CCs excessively to everyone else in the company who are not exactly involved in all replies. Not sure if the sender is trying to cover his ass or to hint to all his colleagues & superiors that he’s on the ball and working really hard. Only add CCs to the people who will need to reply or act on your message.

4. Not using appropriate subject titles. Ocassionally, I receive emails from clients and friends who clicks reply on a previous topic and in same email, start a totally unrelated fresh topic. Guess they were trying to save some time to start a new email and conveniently found an old email to reply from. Having appropriate email subject titles will help your recipients sift between the important emails from the low priority ones.

5. Requesting for “delivery” and “read receipts”. This ranks no. 2 after the all caps email in my hate list. It annoys your recipients even before they start reading the body message. If the email is important and an urgent reply or acknowledgement is required, it would be more polite to ask your recipient to let you know if they have recieved your email.

Btw, you might want to check up our email marketing solutions. You may be interested in the Singapore Spam Control Act and the Spam Meltdown website too.