Tips on how to use e-mail (Best practices)

During more than 15 years implementing different Microsoft messaging systems a common question appears in most of my customers: Is there a set of recommendations for the good usage of mail in my organization?

I’ve found sometimes some of such documents on the Internet, but sadly, they are not generic or sometimes they contain information pertaining to other systems in the company (not only e-mail)

I have decided to write this blog post in the simplest language possible in order to help people find such a guidance in a clear and safe way. The recommendations in this blog post are taken from different publicly articles, books and documents available on the Internet.

Please post comments if you have other suggestions or best practices so we can together make a really good set of practices on e-mail.

Note that I will be posting here tips for end-users. Tips for administrators or operators might be more platform-specific and I’m writing another post on Exchange specific tips.

Tip No. 1: Use e-mail to manage your life, don’t let it BE your life.

Many people spend lots of time of their day in e-mail. Reading, composing, forwarding, deleting, organizing. Don’t let it be the center of your life. If a matter is important, consider meeting the people, if not personally, via web collaboration, instant messaging or other tools. This will let them share more with you and make you give more attention to the social part of life. This will indeed, reduce the amount of messages sent and you will have more time for other activities.

Tip No. 2: Express yourself politely and correctly in e-mail.

E-mail communication is like any other a way to express what you mean. The problem with e-mail is that it is not immediate, this is, it does not give you instant feedback of the effect of what you’ve said. It is more like publishing a book, you might never know the real opinion about it until it hits the bookstores. Emphasis techniques should be used carefully. These techniques can lose its effect if used in an exaggerated manner. They include CAPITALIZATION (which is considered almost like yelling if used extensively), underlining, italicizing or using bold, colors, sizes or different fonts or other effects. Also take care with orthography and syntax which is at least as important as using the right words to address the right people. Most e-mail applications include dictionaries that can help you express yourself as a pro.

Tip No. 3: Save bits, they’re almost inexpensive, but they take TIME.

One of the biggest benefits of e-mail is that it is almost free. Let’s do an exercise: If you read 15 e-mails about a topic that is happening in an e-mail discussion, you can clearly count how many of those e-mails were useful and brought new or important information and how many of them included nonsense answers such as “+1”, “me too”, “ditto”. All these e-mails end up generally in the recycle bin (being deleted anyway) AFTER having being read and processed by the recipient, consuming (the sum of all of them) an important amount of time. So consider this when replying all (does everybody in that list really need to have that e-mail?) or before sending short “answers” (does your answer really add up to the conversation?). All of these e-mails also use STORAGE in your e-mail account and can make you lose TIME figuring out what to delete.

Tip No. 4: Save your reputation (and password)

E-mail accounts are protected by a password. Some e-mail clients, like Outlook often integrate this password with the one that you use to log on to the network. PLEASE! When you are not at your computer, lock your session (Windows Key + L) in Windows operating systems. This will ask you for your password again and nobody will be able to send mail on your behalf from your computer. Also, DO NOT TELL your password to anybody, this includes web pages or programs that you might find in the Internet. It is known that some public accounts have been hijacked because their owners lost control of their passwords. This hijack attacks end up sending e-mail to the user’s contacts and they represent a loss of reputation for the sender (Can you imagine the impression of your boss when receiving offers for “cheap medicines” or other ”treatments” from YOUR e-mail?)

Tip No. 5: Get rid of spam and undesired mailing lists.

Many websites or software that you can download ask you for personal information such as your e-mail address in order to register you in their services. Most of those websites often include options to send you newsletters or offers. Unless you want them, do not accept this kind of offers, sometimes they can be annoying. If you receive this kind of newsletters the best you can do is unsubscribing from them via their webpage (they normally allow you to do so) or, if you don’t have their page or any other means to unsubscribe, make your anti-spam mechanisms eat up those e-mails (but remember, it is a good advice to check the junk e-mail folder to see if something important went there inadvertently).

Tip No. 6: Know your e-mail program’s features

Most e-mail software includes interesting features such as calendaring, task lists, rules, alerts, folders, personal contacts and groups and other cool things. Many of these features will help you auto-organize and survive the information overload that can come through e-mail. The best way to learn to use these tools is by using them, and maybe making some mistakes, but normally you can recover the items from the deleted items folder or you can undo what you mistakenly tried. The best advice here is: RTFM (Read the feature manual), which comes nowadays in electronic form via the help menu of every software. You’ll be amazed how quick you can learn new tricks and how they will improve your time with the software. Some software, for instance allow you to cipher or encrypt messages… use this feature when you feel that it is really important to protect the content or certify that was generated by you, otherwise you’re making other people lose time while decrypting (even though it is only a couple seconds per message).

Tip No. 7: Blind carbon copy (BCC) wizardry. Copying your boss for everything.

I’ve noticed some people always includes somebody in the BCC field for a lot of their communications. BCC can be useful in some scenarios, but beware: Many people tends to Reply all. If your “blind” recipient replies to all over one of your messages, those people that were not aware of your recipient will wonder how that e-mail got there. It has happened to me in the past with a conversation that I wanted to keep my boss informed and he got anxious to take action on the issue, I got really uncomfortable with that. Also, think the consequences before you BCC to someone, or to lists or to recipients external to your company.

Tip No. 8: Smart signatures and autotexts

E-mail programs let you create “signatures” for your e-mails, sometimes you can also create automatic texts that get attached to what you write and can get you in trouble. For instance, do not start with “Dear John” or end your mail with “Kisses” when sending mail to a potential employer (unless John is really “dear” to you!)

Also do not use a lot of stuff in all your e-mails. Different signatures can be selected for each use. Unless you want to show your academic titles and/or technical certifications to everybody it is not very well seen in some environments that you send all that in all your e-mails.

Tip No. 9: Backup, backup, backup

Most e-mail programs offer a way to do backup of your data. This can happen automatically sometimes. Configure your e-mail program (RTFM again) to do it and KNOW where your backups are. Even if your e-mail is stored in a server, remember that servers have limited storage, so make copies of all important data and try to store it in separate media from your computer (USB memories and disks are getting cheaper every day and they work great!)

Tip No. 10: Save trees

Modern monitors have very good resolution. You can really read long documents today if you count on a decent monitor and an adequate illumination in the room. Think before you print. Printing is one of the most environmental unfriendly activities that we do. If you really need a hard copy of an e-mail, try to print in the least number of pages possible. Print only once. And remember to go and get your print job from the printer (do not forget it, as it can have personal information on it).

Finally, please contribute with other tips you can figure out… Maybe 10 is not the right number, It could be 100s of tips… it depends on you, my reader!

Thanks for your comments!