Best Practices for Bulk E-Mail

Senders of bulk e-mail (for example, to DH Email) need to think about additional best practices for message originators.

Limiting the Distribution List

Instead of always blanketing the campus with e-mail to the DHEMAIL list, consider making a sublist of people who are likely to be interested in the mail you are sending.

Blindcopying Mailing Lists

Hiding the e-mail addresses of your colleagues is a common courtesy and considered good netiquette. Have you ever received a bulk e-mail with which one-half of the screen is taken up by the detailed recipients list? Your e-mails don’t have to make that gaffe. If you enter your recipients’ addresses in Outlook’s Bcc (blind carbon copy) box, your recipients’ e-mail addresses will be hidden from each other upon their receipt of the mail.

Beware of “Reply”

When replying to bulk e-mail, ask yourself this question: “Should I direct this reply to the sender of the original message or to the entire list?” Fortunately, Outlook gives us two options: Reply [to sender] and Reply to All [the sender and all recipients]. See also “Ditto” [below].

“Ditto”

Do you want to make people angry? Just reply to the group, copying out an entire, long message and adding the words “I agree” or “ditto.”

Quotes

Another important point of courtesy comes up in replying to messages. Quote enough of the original message to make your reply clear—but only that much. This will usually mean that you are not quoting the entire message. By default, Outlook will indent the original text of a message, thereby clearly setting the quoted sentence(s) off from the reply. Another common technique in e-mail is to precede each sentence at each level of the original message with a caret (>). If you are replying to a reply, two carets should precede each original sentence. For example, the lines

>>and do you agree
>>with the proposal to
>>hold the division-
>>wide retreat at the
>>Canoodle Inn?
>
>Yes. Please make the
>necessary arrange
>ments.
Arrangements made. We’ve reserved the ballroom from 8 a.m.-4 p.m.

show three levels of e-mail—the original (two carets), the first reply (one caret), and the current response (no prefix).

Flames

A “flame” is a personal attack sent in electronic form. Sending a flame usually invites a reply in kind. Remember that e-mail doesn’t transmit body language such as a smiling face that says the original message was a joke. Sending a flame to a mailing list is especially bad form and should lead to many flaming replies.

See also Best Practices for All E-Mail.