Email Etiquette

We started thinking that perhaps many people really don’t know what good email etiquette is, so here are a few (there are more) rules of etiquette to guide you. We’re sure there are more; maybe you can think of some to add.

EMAIL ETIQUETTE

• Do not send messages without a subject line
• Do not send a 2nd email to complain “the first” was not answered quick enough; keep in mind some people are not on their computers every day
• Do not click reply to an old message and talk about something completely different from the subject line
• When responding to a message leave the original message intact
• Do not include oversized attachments in email; try to keep them below 500 kb, or send an email to the recipient and warn them you have a large file ready to be sent
• Do not send exe files in email; many email services will block the email
• Never pass on warnings or other alerts by email that say “send to all your friends”. The majority of them are hoaxes.
• Do not use “Spam Challenge” emails and expect people to prove themselves, especially to a company since most companies would not be able to do this. And, spammers could send these same mails and fool people into “proving” they exist for nefarious reasons.
• Do not use “vacation responders”. Your close friends will know if you are gone; everyone else can wait until you get home. If you really need to access email use a web mail account like Gmail you can access from anywhere
• Do not use or expect others to allow “read receipts”. If someone wants you to know your mail has been read, they will respond to you .
• Don’t send mails with cc’s of all your friends; be sure you use bcc.
• Don’t assume because you have a high-speed connection that everyone else does too. There are still many people using dial-up. Nothing is more irritating to those folks than receiving an embedded video they can’t watch, or a huge embedded image that takes them fifteen or twenty minutes to download.