10 Simple Rules for Writing eMail

The days of communicating face to face or even over the phone are slowing fading away. Electronic mail has become the main form of communication in our society. Anyone remember hand-writing letters? Of course you don’t unless you're 90. The sad thing is that if we did remember when we hand-wrote letters, maybe our eMail communications would be better today.

I guess what I’m saying is try to use etiquette for eMail similar to hand-writing a letter but not as short (or stupid) as texting. Our society has become so “immediate gratification” and “instant notification” that we often don’t slow down and make sense when we compose eMail. eMail shouldn’t be written like texting, Twitter or Facebook (those are a whole other level of communication).

I probably receive or write 50-100 emails a day and I have seen some of the worst and the best. Here are a few rules that you can follow to make the experience better for you and the recipient. Most of these are business related but still apply to just about any eMail communication.

1. Use punctuation and paragraphs: Nothing annoys me more than receiving an email that is one continuous sentence or one continuous paragraph. Periods and hard returns are your friend. Use them to separate thoughts and ideas in your message. If the message is more than 8-10 lines with no breaks, I probably won’t read it.
2. Don’t use slang, abbreviations or vernacular: If your recipient is from another state, region or country, they might not know why you are “fixing to start on a project”. Was it broken? Also, abbreviations that you are familiar with aren’t always familiar to others (PLSS). Lastly, vernacular can just make you look dumb. Write intelligently. You aren’t sitting on your front porch sipping moonshine.
3. Don’t use animated .gif or elaborate signatures: Fancy images or signatures will get stripped off by most mail servers anyway. If they do, your message won’t have anything at the bottom, including your name. Just use a text based name, phone number or address (as appropriate). Simple is better.
4. Spell check: Auto-correct is not always your friend. I sent a message one time and attempted to say something about being “ornery” and it auto-corrected to “horny”. Not cool since it was going to a State Official. Plus the word “ornery” violates rule #2 anyway. Serves me right!
5. Be succinct but thorough enough to convey your thought: If I have to scroll down more than one screen to read your entire message, I won’t read it. To quote Sweet Brown; “Ain’t nobody got time for that” (Google it, it’s a thing). If your thoughts are that deep and involved, maybe you should just pick up the phone.
6. Make your subject line relevant: Emails without subject lines will likely get treated as spam by most email servers, and me. Also, if you are replying to an old message, make sure you change the subject line to relate to your new email, instead of the one you are replying to. “Look at this” as a subject line will almost guarantee that I don’t
7. Don’t use stupid fonts: Squiggly fonts or fonts that look like handwriting or script are difficult enough to read on a regular monitor let alone a mobile device. Same thing applies to fonts with a “serif” like Garamond. Simple fonts such as Arial or anything San Serif are easier to read across all platforms. Don’t get cute.
8. Don’t use backgrounds: Backgrounds are stupid. Don’t use them.
9. Don’t “CC” 50 people: If you place a large number of addresses in the “CC” line some email services will blacklist you as a spammer. I don’t know what the exact number is, but you don’t want to be blacklisted. It is hard to get un-blacklisted. Also, the people you are including in your “CC” list might not want their email address blasted to everyone. Consider using “BCC”
10. Use Attachments cautiously: Some file types will get stripped and flagged as malicious by mail services (*.xls, *.exe, *.html etc) Try to keep attachment sizes to a minimum. Not everyone has unlimited file storage or fast internet connections. Remember, some people read their emails on a mobile device anyway and attachments don’t always come through. Besides that, they are annoying.

As always, these are just suggestions. But my general rule of life applies in this, and most all cases:

If it's stupid, don't do it!

[HONORABLE MENTION #11] One email, One topic