Email is an important tool - Use it wisely

I have been thinking to write on this topic for a long time because I realize that emailing habits and its use is changing rapidly which has its good and mostly bad effects. Emails have become so ubiquitous that some people have stopped realizing its importance. I believe there are several points regarding emails that people must know for a better experience with such a great tool.

1. Subject of Email - Always give a subject to your email. Long or short-but it should tell what a person should expect in the email. 'No Subject' emails can be more often considered as spam by spam filters. Never capitalize all the letter of email subject, it will increase the chances of your email be considered a spam.

2. Mail Forwarding - Avoid this temptation as much as you can. Do not forward the mails which say 'Forward this mail to so many people, else xyz will happen.' If the mail is interesting and you really want to forward it, remove this line and other stuff which adds because the mail comes through so many places. Add the addresses in BCC, so that it will be difficult for unscrupulous program to harvest email addresses form your mail. If you keep on forwarding emails regularly without cleaning as I mentioned earlier, you might be flagged as spammer by many servers. Even if servers do not flag as spammer, many recipients will. I know I would.

3. Emails are not instant messaging - The person might be reading your mail at the instant you wrote or may be few days later. Try to be a little explanatory in your emails. Make sure there are few (no) spelling mistakes and not many acronyms are used. Write the emails in a structured way unless they are a quick reply to a question. Especially when you are writing emails to a professional contact, you must maintain proper structure of the mail without spelling mistakes.

4. Proper mail structure - Proper mail structure means; clear subject of the mail and the mail should start with Dear/Respected, then subject matter and end with Sincerely or regards with proper contact information as signature. A mail with improper structure may be flagged as spam and that happens quite often.

5. Mail management - My suggestion is that if you do not know how to manage emails or cannot do that, do not use email. It is extremely frustrating when somebody says that they didn't receive emails (If I send email to you then you will receive it). In rare chance it might be considered a spam, and so it is important to check a list of your spam emails regularly and block unnecessary emails. Filter your mails to proper label or folder for proper viewing and management. Set up a fixed time to reply to mails.

6. Be careful what you write in email - Emails are pretty much a proof and do not destroy themselves. So, if you badmouth about someone on an email, be ready for that email to be used against yourself at the worst of times. This lesson is mostly learned the hard way, unfortunately.

7. Orkut/Facebook are different than email - People forget that quite often. Orkut/Facebook are for writing short messages and wishing at the right occasions, may be forming some group or collaboration. Scraps are not for writing long, detailed and/or personal messages for the world to see. Do not use very personalized words like abuses as well in scraps. Scrapbook is the worst place for that.

8. Maintaining multiple email accounts - Many people maintain multiple email accounts with one as a work email, one as contact email and one for signing up for subscriptions and spams. It is important then to give correct email address to people whose emails you want to read and reply. If you have somebody's work email, do not forward funny or viral mails to that account at all.

If the mails are managed properly and attended to regularly, you can accomplish several important tasks through the emails itself. In the following post, I would talk about managing emails in a little more detail.

Let me know if you find above tips useful.
Raag

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