In a work email, get straight to the point: “I’m hoping you will. . . " “I think we should. . . . " etc. right up front, making the case in the following lines. Many people only read the first few lines before deciding to respond or to save for later. Those line should give enough of the “meat” to allow an informed decision. For personal emails, it’s often a nice idea to open with a brief personal note before getting into the main point of your email.
Don’t zip email attachments unless necessary. Unless an attachment is too large to send otherwise, you risk wasting your recipient’s time and possibly hinder them from accessing your attachments. Many mobile devices are unable to uncompress zip files. Additionally it’s redundant since many common files like . xlsx, . docx, . pptx (MS Excel, Word and Powerpoint) are already in a compressed format. Keep in mind that many people or businesses will not open attachments from someone they don’t know, and some email accounts are set up to automatically send emails with attachments to the spam folder, so if you’re applying for a job, for example, make sure you follow the recipient’s instructions regarding attachments. If no instructions are given, send another email to let the recipient know you’ll be sending an email with an attachment.
Email has also become a tool to ask or tell people things that you would normally never say face-to-face (ever wonder why you become a different person instinctively online?). If you are sending someone anything, reread it and ask yourself if you would say this to them if they were right next to you, or face-to-face. If it’s on a touchy subject, read it twice.
Some abbreviations, such as “BTW” for “By the Way,” are commonly used in emails and are generally acceptable except in formal, professional emails.
Be careful about requesting ACTION from more than one person in the “To:” field. This can lead to multiple efforts for the same task, or no effort because it’s assumed someone else is handling the request. If sending an e-mail to a list of people whose addresses you want to keep private, put them all in the BCC field and put your own address in the “to” field. If you want to phase someone out of the thread (for example, if they have introduced you to someone else, and now you and that person are working out some details and you don’t want to bog down the inbox of the introducer) move the person’s address from the “to” or CC field over to the BCC field.
Avoid prioritizing your messages for the recipient. Get out of the habit of marking every email as “Urgent!” or “High Priority” or your emails will end up being treated like the boy who cried wolf and they’ll all get ignored. It is irritating and presumptuous to assume your e-mail request is higher in the queue than anybody else’s, especially in a work context. Be gracious enough to give the receiver credit for working out for themselves how to prioritize your message.
