Email etiquette
Email is by many considered the prefered method of communcation. As with most other forms of social interaction, there are good rules of etiquette that should be followed. Here I seek to clarify a few of them.
As a lot of communication happens over email, one is required to have a sensible attitude as to how email should be used. This compiles a set of guidance rules which can make the world a slightly better place.
With a good email client and good habits, it is not much work, nor very frustrating, to handle sizable amounts of emails. For between two and three hundred messages a day it should not take more than an hour to get through them all, including answering important things, given that the sender and reciever cultivates good email culture.
The elements of an email
Subject
The subject of email should describe the content in less than 50 characters. Even though this might seem like a daunting task to some, keep in mind that it should be easy to prioritize or ignore a message soley based on its subject.
The effect of CAPITAL LETTERS and Shouting!!! (in form of exclaimation marks) to draw attention to a message is highly limited. It is better to formulate a sensible explanation on what's important and why it's urgent.
Sender
You should always make sure your email client, or mail user agent (MUA for short) shows your name as the sender. Most people doesn't have their full name in their email address, making it hard to identify the sender. In particular, many webmail interfaces are bad at this.
Signature
It's common that email messages are ended with a signature. It's advisable that your signature should contain enough information that all the recipients knows who you are. You don't have to include all information on your position, full contact information, and so on, but enough information so that the recipients can find it if they are in need of it.
Perhaps more importantly, there are standards on how a signature should be written. Summarized, the signature width should not exceed 72, maximum 80, characters. The signature should start with “-- ” on a separate line. That is: Two dashes and a space. The signature length should not exceed four lines.
There is of course no need to include ones own email address in the signature, as this will be visible in the From field for the recipient. It's common to include name and position, organization, a link to one's homepage, and perhaps a slogan or a short quotation.
Some leave out their name from the signature, as this also appears in the From field. It's also advisable to leave out words bearing no relevance to the context, such as “Homepage:” or “Position:”, when the information speaks for itself.
I've included two examples of different signatures:
-- Ole M. Johannesen Phone: (+47) 99 99 99 99 Tester, Foobar Software <http://home.example.com/~omj/>
And the other example:
--
Ole M. Johansen Tester, Foobar Software
«I believe there's a real world out there, Phone: (+47) 99 99 99 99
because not all of my fantasies work.» <http://home.example.com/~omj/>
-- Boretz
The actual agreed-upon standardizations for signatures are described in the RFC 1855 and RFC 3676. I decided to include them here merely for academic interests.
Answering email
You answer email when you feel it is necessary, but you should not send irrelevant or unneccesary comments. This also applies if you are wondering whether a message made it to the recipient. If such is the case, you will recieve an email in return with an error message within a couple of hours, describing what went wrong. If you do not recieve such a message, you can only assume that the message was delivered successfully.
Email is, however, a method of communication that many people rely upon. Many companies and organizations are exclusively using email for their internal and external communications. This sets some demands to the receipient of emails. If you give your email address to someone, you are also expected to reply to messages requiring your input. Email is a two-way communication, just as with speech.
The dos and don'ts
Text only, please
Emails should be sent in plain text format, and never in HTML. While most modern MUAs supports HTML-formatted emails, there are many drawbacks by using it.
Line lengths
As emails only should be sent in plain text format, you should also wrap your lines at between 70 and 80 characters. In the RFC 2822, 78 characters per line is specified.
Initially, breaking the lines was necessary for displaying emails correctly
on text-only terminals. This has since become the norm for mail authoring,
however. Web technologies, such as HTML, behaves differently as they are
built to resemble typesetting qualities. In HTML line breaks (carriage
return and new line) does not affect the output, as new lines must be
specified through a tag (<br />).
If you're using a sensible editor, it will already be programmed to conventiently perform this task for you. In GNU Emacs, you can use the M-q shortcut to wrap and indent the line correctly. There is an equvialent in Vim by pressing gqap, although this is not as sophisticated as Emacs', it will do the trick.
Some other mail user agents also have settings for automatically wrapping mails upon sending them.
Quote correctly
On
Attachments
In particular you should avoid attaching Microsoft Word documents1.
Don't disguise your emails
Make sure your email setup is correct
Don't use stupid mail service providers
Some free (gratis) email providers, such as Hotmail and Yahoo
Remove signatures when quoting
Use the correct character encoding
There are many mysterious characters out and about in email communication. Not long ago this posed a real problem, when people with a Cyrilic character set (e.g. Russian) tried to communicate with people with a Japanese character set, or let alone tried to combine these, the result was often disasterous.
Today, this is not a problem anymore. Still, there are still people out there still pledging their alligence to the old Latin character sets, popularly known as ISO-8859-1. While it works for the most part, problems arise when you attempt to communicate with someone using characters from a different character set in an email which you must quote.
A text you would need to quote would be rendered unreadable by most MUAs if you tried combining two types of character sets.
This poses no problem any more, however. Make sure your editor and MUA is set to save and encode messages in UTF-8 encoding, and you should be able to see and write most common languages in the same segment of text.
If you are still pledging to use a Latin character set, you are ruining the web for the rest of us. Please don't. Be civil and respect the language of the person you communicate with.
Conclusion and further reading
Hopefully this has given you a good idea on how to communicate more efficently.
Email is the prime method of communication on the internet, and it is necessary to enlight more people on the etiquette of its use. Therefore, I am asking you to pass these advice on, either by sharing a link to this article, or by writing your own
Footnotes
- Microsoft Word documents typically carry the .doc or .docx file suffixes.