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E-Mail Best Practices
What did we do before e-mail? Do you remember that until just a few years ago we received all mail in metal or hard plastic inboxes? That mail is now affectionately called “snail mail.” Snail business mail conforms to universally accepted guidelines that include:
- A return address and current date
- The name and address of the recipient
- An optional subject line
- A salutation
- A body
- A signature and other important additional contact information
Happily, our Outlook mail program creates much of this data automatically in our outgoing e-mail. What’s the problem, then? What’s the point of this article? It’s this. Information Technology receives many complaints about the campus e-mail system—not technical complaints, but complaints about the use and perceived misuse of our e-mail system. The point of this article, then, is to present some things to think about—some suggestions that may produce a campus full of happy e-mail users.
Overarching principles of these e-mail best practices include:
- Be aware of the e-mail reader’s time and bandwidth.
- Remember that body language such as a smiling face will not be transmitted with the message.
Here’s netiquette’s bottom line: remember to apply the courtesy you extend in your real life behavior to your online life and remember that human beings are at the other end of your e-mails.
Here are the best practices:
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