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Effective use of email

Good writing is the same whatever the medium, and the elements of effective communication are the same in conventional mail and email.

But there are important differences, and not understanding them reduces the effectiveness of your communication. It can also make you look silly or get you into trouble.

Email is a more casual medium than postal mail but more formal than talking to someone over the phone. You can't convey changes in tone of voice or facial expressions over email, nor can you get an immediate response. With email, it's harder to get your point across and easier to be misunderstood.

Remember that usually you do not need to be as formal in an email as you would be in a letter, but don’t forget that email can be stored for a long time or forwarded to many people.

A good tip is to avoid expressing anger or chastising someone in an email – talk to the other person face-to-face or by phone; your anger will still have immediate venting impact, without the corrosive effect of written words that can be read over and over again.

Never underestimate the power of a well-crafted email as an effective tool for communication. Put as much thought into writing an email message as you would when writing a letter. Write it with your purpose and audience in mind .

Make good use of the subject line

Select a title for your email that reflects its content. Make your subject as detailed and specific as possible, e.g. ‘Agenda for casework planning meeting on 7 Sept’ rather than ‘Agenda for meeting’.

If you want to have an attention-grabbing subject line, be brief and direct. Use active punchy words. Avoid overusing all-caps and exclamation marks as your messages could be mistaken for spam.

Don’t overuse the priority tag option.

Never leave your subject line empty. It's the first thing your recipient sees even before he or she reads the body of your message.

Check your email before sending

The main thing to remember with email is that once you hit ‘Send’, the message is out of your hands. This seems obvious, but it is often difficult for people to remember that once they send an email, it can be transferred, transposed, or misdirected. So take a minute to proof it and run the spellchecker. Due to the fast nature of email, things can easily become confused and messy.

Keep in mind that anything you send is recorded permanently on the server. Even after an email is deleted, it remains on the server.

And then, there's the embarrassing experience of sending email to someone other than the intended recipient. This often happens when you use the ‘Reply to all’ button which sends your email back to all the recipients of the original email. There's an easy way to avoid this: stop and look at the ‘To:’ line before you hit ‘Send.’ Always.

Finally, the law regarding email sent from your organisation's computer is pretty unambiguous: the mail doesn't belong to you, it belongs to your organisation. So while you may have the illusion of privacy, your organisation could search the server for any reason and retrieve the email you sent or received from your office computer.

Keep control over your inbox

It is easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of email you receive each day. One way to deal with this is to filter your email into different mailboxes. If you are a subscriber to listservs, you will receive large amounts of daily email. You do not need to read it immediately, and you do not need to leave it all in your main inbox. It is also a good practice to clean out your main inbox every week or so. This keeps the box from getting too full, removes storage pressure on your organisation's server, and helps you throw away messages you don't need (and discover important messages you forgot to answer before it's too late).

Email etiquette

Learning proper email etiquette or ‘netiquette’ can help make your communication more effective, persuasive and less likely to annoy or offend your recipients.

Be clear, precise and targeted

The more focused your email is, especially the subject line, the more likely your message will actually be noticed, read, understood and (if necessary) responded to.

Use the BCC line to maintain privacy

When you're sending a message to a group of people, particularly if they don't know each other, enter their addresses in the BCC line to protect everyone's privacy. You may need to enter an address in the ‘To’ line. If you are sending the message to more than a dozen people, do a mail merge that results in one message per person. Microsoft Word 2000 and later is capable of this technique; it can save your message from being mistaken for spam by filtering software that blocks messages with many addresses in the BCC field.

Be careful of your tone

The tone of your email depends on the level of formality you think appropriate. Be a little more formal during the first contact. You can adopt a more casual tone in follow-up messages.

Remember that it’s hard to convey emotions in an email – sarcasm or humour will most likely be misunderstood.

Reread your message carefully from your recipient's viewpoint to detect possible misunderstandings.

Email shorthand

Email technologies have created online communities with their own jargon, abbreviations and acronyms. Here are some of the most common:

• BTW: by the way
• FWIW: for what it's worth
• FYI: for your information
• IMHO: in my humble/honest opinion
• HTH: hope that helps
• LOL: laughing out loud
• RSN: real soon now
• OTOH/OTO: on the one hand/on the other hand
• NRN: no response needed (for the email-this is the end of the conversation)

However, don't overdo it.

Pick fonts and colours carefully

• Messages with overly large fonts can irritate your recipients. Changing every word in the message to a different colour is also a bad idea. And for recipients with different email programs to yours, your message may come through completely garbled.
• Also avoid the use of repeated exclamation marks! Nobody is that excited.
• Don't use all-caps in your message text unless you really mean it.

Be thoughtful with forwarding

If you're forwarding a message, especially one with a long string of correspondence, or responding to a string of messages, delete unnecessary information like repeated signature lines, long strings of angle brackets, i.e. ‘<<<<,’ and blank spaces. Make sure it's still clear who wrote what in the conversation.

Don’t ‘reply to all’ unless you need to

When replying to an email with multiple recipients think about who needs to see your reply. If it only needs to go back to the sender, don’t waste the time of other recipients by replying to all of them as well. If you need to reply to the sender and only some of the recipients then edit out the names of those who don’t need to see your response. Sometimes there is a fine line between cluttering other people’s inboxes and informing a supervisor, for example, that you have dealt with the issue.

Attachments

Check the size of any attachments to your email. Many people don't like to or can’t receive large attachments, or won't be able to read your particular file format.

Organising your calendar using your email software

Most email software has a calendar function that allows you to:

• keep an appointments diary;
• schedule meetings within the organisation via a ‘meeting request’ email to prospective attendees;
• book meeting rooms;
• accept, amend and cancel meeting requests; and 
• share aspects of your calendar with other staff so that they can see your busy times (but not necessarily what you are doing).

As these functions are integrated into your office email system they can save a lot of time in organising a meeting with colleagues. They can also be useful for fostering a sense of community in the organisation, for organising internal projects or teams, publicising events or meetings and increasing participation.

Getting organised: 10 tips for dealing with the stress of email overload

1. Attack new email messages at the start of the day.
2. Immediately delete unnecessary messages.
3. Avoid constantly checking your Inbox and replying to every email – check your messages first thing, maybe at lunchtime and then at the end of the day, otherwise shut down your Inbox altogether.
4. Prioritise: deal with the important ones first and leave the others until later.
5. Bearing in mind Tip 4 above, reply to the quick-to-answer ones first.
6. Use the functions of your email program (e.g. Outlook) to help prioritise and to sort, file, delete or respond to messages and use other features to best effect e.g. Out of Office, auto redirect.
7. Set up your own personal folders with meaningful subject names so you can sort and save important emails.
8. Don’t get ‘email happy’ when meetings or the phone would be better.
9. Put in place workplace policies about when not to send emails.
10. Remember not all emails need a reply, e.g. ‘cc’ mail, and remember not to click the ‘Reply-All’ unless you really have to. And sometimes it’s better not to email ‘thanks’!

Source: ‘Drowning in email’, David Stonehouse, Technology section, Sunday Life magazine, Sunday Telegraph 25 June 2005.

Email usage policies

It is a good idea to have an email usage policy so that staff and management are clear about their respective rights and obligations. A policy should cover the following issues.

• Personal use of email and the web. Most people in any organisation use the office email system for personal use in the same way they use the office phone to make and receive personal calls – set the boundaries of what is appropriate and what isn’t.
• Password security. Don’t share it with anyone, and make sure that accounts and passwords are terminated when people leave.
• Virus and spyware security. Don’t open attachments when you don’t know who’s sent them to you. Chances are it’s a virus or spyware – especially attachments with suffixes like .doc (macros), .xls (also macros), .exe (DOS/Windows executables), .vbs (visual basic scripts), and .js (javascript).
• Record management of emails. Delete them when no longer required; file others away that you need to keep; ensure that paper copies are kept for legal purposes.
• Confidentiality and privacy. Think twice before sending out confidential material via email. Email is not the most secure means of message transfer and other more secure means of delivery should be used when required.
• General netiquette. Keep emails short and to the point, with a meaningful subject line; think before sending.

Email disclaimers

Most organisations place a legal disclaimer concerning confidentiality at the end of outgoing emails. This can be done by automatically adding it when emails are sent from your server or it can be added to the email ‘signature’ (often found under the Tools/Options menu of your email software) on everyone’s PC.

Keep your disclaimer simple and in plain English. A good simple example is:

Important: This message may contain confidential or legally privileged information. If you think it was sent to you by mistake, please delete all copies and advise the sender. For the purposes of the SPAM Act 2003, this email is authorised by .

An optional addition to cover the distinction between personal and organisational correspondence might be:

Any views expressed in this email are those of the individual sender except where the sender expressly states them to be the views of .