In the last few years, social networks like Facebook have become a major part of social communication. People plan events with their friends, they shout out what they ate for breakfast, and perhaps most importantly – they post pictures of their cats and babies.
When it comes to long and important messages, though, email still reigns supreme, and though it’s been around for decades, people are still fucking terrible at using it. So I’m going to share with you a sort of email etiquette that I’ve come up with on the fly after years of receiving terrible or completely irrelevant emails. I’m not talking about spam either, no… I’m talking about the every day, run of the mill emails that I receive from friends, family, and colleagues.
What Makes a Good Email?
Through a mixed list of what one should, and should not do, I hope to help make your communications with friends, family, and clients so much better. Writing an email that’s clear and concise really isn’t very difficult, nor is it time consuming. It just means using a bit of extra thought.
So on that note, here are my suggestions for good email etiquette…
- Decide on one major topic per email. If you want to talk about your vacation, great. If you’re catching up with an old friend and want to talk about what you’ve been doing for the past year, no problem. Just please for the love of all that is holy, avoid bringing up a million disparate topics – especially when they’re unexpected. Writing about cats, and then trying to plan an event in the same email is exceptionally annoying. Writing to ask about a particular product, and then talking about your long dead child in a business related email is even more annoying. Just don’t do it.
- Make sure that you have a clearly defined email title. This goes hand in hand with the last point, and though I admit it can be really tough to do – do it anyway. If you’ve decided on a clear topic for the email, that makes this much easier. It cuts down on the “Baby Update #62, Clubbing night with the girls? Amazing restaurant you have to try” type email titles.
- Do not start a new email by replying to an old, unrelated email to the same person. I’ve experienced this many, many times in both business and social emails, and it never fails to annoy me. I go from confused (why are they replying to this email from 6 months ago??) to annoyed. Just start a new email, it’s really not that difficult.
- If you’ve been CCd on an email to a group of people, and the sender needs a personal reply from you, do not hit “reply all”. Unless the email is relevant to everyone in the group, this can become annoying in short order with everyone replying to everyone else’s emails. Only reply to the relevant parties.
- This last point is impossible to avoid all the time, but spending more time thinking about what you want to say can help. Please try and avoid sending 5 different emails on the exact same topic within 5 minutes of each other. People forget things, and I’m certainly no exception, but it becomes confusing trying to figure out which email to reply to on which point.
That’s really about it, and I’m guessing you’re going to say that a few of these are common sense. Well, you’re right about that, but unfortunately there are times when people don’t employ common sense. If you’ve ever been the recipient of dozens of emails after you’ve been CCd on a collection of wedding photos from a family member, then perhaps you really know what I’m talking about. It’s never pleasant, and much like recycling, we all need to do our part to cut down on crap.
If you have any other suggestions for more email etiquette policies, tips on sending out awesome emails, or even details of a particularly terrible email experience you’ve had, please share it with us in the comments below. We would love to hear about them!
(Photo by Ed Yourdon)
