Effective E-Mail – a few suggestions
- Change resolution of pictures to something reasonable – large files are slow to download for people with slow connections and fill up space for everyone.
- Post things that will be used more than once on the web – if you are responsible for a topic, post the information in a logical location rather than expecting everyone in your e-mail group to stash it away somewhere.
- Put only one topic in each e-mail – that way the recipient can process it appropriately without having to separate out different topics to be put in different places.
- Put a concise, meaningful subject in (that will show up appropriately when truncated) – most people don’t do the final processing of their e-mail on first reading. The subject will let them find it easily and remember what it is about without opening it. Long subjects will only display the first part.
- Think about whether the recipient really wants to see what you are sending out – most everyone gets a great deal of spam. If they don’t appreciate what is being sent, it is just one more thing cluttering things up.
- If angry, slow down and reread your missive – it is hard to retrieve an e-mail that you have sent out. And sometimes upon reflection, you don’t really want to say that.
- Look at your recipient line before clicking send – by just clicking reply, or letting your editor auto-fill the recipient, you can end up sending something to someone that you really didn’t mean to.
- Respect the privacy of e-mail addresses. When sending to multiple people, use bcc unless there is a reason for everyone to see all addresses. While addresses are not particularly private, you don’t want to be the one to ‘out’ someone as being a member of a particular group.
- When continuing a long chain of replies, stop and erase the bottom messages if they don’t apply. This will remove clutter, and in case the recipient is conscientious and actually reads everything to see if they’ve missed something, it will save them time. And it will mean that you don’t forward something that you didn’t mean to.
- Don’t give your password to others – you want to make sure that any e-mail sent out on your account is something that you meant to send.
Return to e-mail index