General Email Etiquette
Some hints to make you a good
citizen of the enterprise messaging community:
- Limit distribution - Don't Reply to All if nobody else needs to or cares to know.
- Only use the "High Importance" designations for messages that are of especially high importance or urgency.Overuse makes the feature meaningless.
- Neater is better.
- Respect others peoples' privacy (particularly when going out the internet), use BCC for group sends, unless everybody needs to know everybody on the list.
- Use of abusive or otherwise terse language is not recommended. Please keep you emails formal, business relative, and to the point.
- DON'T DO ALL CAPS AS IF YOU'RE YELLING! ONLY use upper-case words when trying to make a point (such as I just did). Even at that, you should be careful with who you are exchanging messages.
- Do not send or forward non-business material
- Don't Be A Novelist. Messages should be concise and to the point.
- Too Much Punctuation!!! Don't get caught up in grammar and punctuation, especially excessive punctuation. If something is important it should be reflected in your text, not in your punctuation.
- Signatures. Since it's not possible (yet) to sign your e-mail, users will sometimes include the same information at the bottom of their e-mail messages. We highly recommend this practice because the originator is not always clear to the recipient. Lots of companies use abbreviated names or numbers for employee e-mail addresses and those abbreviations or numbers will mean little to someone not familiar with their significance. We also recommend that you included your e-mail address in this information. Sometimes it can be very difficult to locate your e-mail address in the information that's a part of transmission, especially if it's going across the Internet. If your e-mail address is a business address, We include your title and company name in the signature. We recommend that you keep the total number of lines for the signature down to four or less.