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A Short Guide to E-Mail Etiquette
Nowadays most of us communicate via email every day, so it makes sense to have some simple etiquette rules in place to ensure your emails are doing their job effectively.
Email etiquette (or should that be E-tiquette?) is something of a grey area. There are no hard and fast rules about what’s acceptable in the content of your email, although as a general rule email is accepted as a less formal method of communication than a traditional letter. So it’s acceptable to begin with ‘Hi….’ Rather than ‘Dear …’. Similarly, it’s fine to close your message with ‘regards’ or ‘see you soon’ rather than ‘yours sincerely / faithfully’.
It’s the sending and receiving of email where E-tiquette really comes into play. The golden rule to remember is to address your email to the primary recipient (in the ‘To’ field) and copy anyone else in who may be interested using the ‘CC’ field. DON’T just add a whole string of email addresses to the ‘TO’ field. Why? Because if there is an action point in the email, none of the recipients will realise who it’s directed to. Is it them? Should they take some kind of action? Or just assume someone else on the list will take care of it? Either way, confusion is the result.
What about the ‘BCC’ field? This is used to copy someone in on an email without the prime recipient being aware. Obviously this raises an ethical issue so should be used with caution – exercise your own judgement.
But the biggest email ‘Don’t’ is almost certainly the misuse of the ‘Reply to all’ button: one of the prime culprits responsible for ever-burgeoning inboxes. Let’s take an example. Someone sends an email out to 12 recipients to let them know about a meeting. Each one replies by checking the ‘reply to all’ button. The result: 144 emails taking up valuable inbox space and reading time for the recipients.
And I’m sure we’ve all received email from those that seem to copy in everyone in their address book, regardless of whether the message is relevant to them or not. This is often used as a ‘CYA’ tactic (ie, ‘I did send you an email about this last week…). Sound advice is to copy in those that really need to read the content of your email – otherwise you run the risk of generating tons of unwanted messages.
| DOWNLOAD | | [ A Short Guide to E-Mail Etiquette ] |
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