E Mail Ethics and Etiquettes

Some ethics and etiquettes to be followed while writing an e-mail

1. E-Mail: Ethics & Etiquettes
Raghunath G Soman

2. Why Email Ethics Are Necessary?
•The kind of e-mail you write gives
clues about your own personality.
•The biggest status cue is your
competence with the language. If
you have lots of misspellings, your
subjects do not agree with your
verbs, or you use the wrong words,
people may assume that you are
uneducated.
•From that, they may infer that you
are not very clever!!

3. Mail IDs
•Mail ID gives many subtle cues. Having a
short ID, without numbers, indicates that
you are one of the first in your domain to
get an email account.
Thus, [email protected] is probably a more
senior person than [email protected].
•People also make assumptions about your
maturity and formality level. They will
take [email protected] more
seriously than [email protected].

4. Before you compose
•The first step in writing e-mail message is
to identify the purpose of the message and
determining what the recipient reading the
message has to do.
•Focus your objective. Achieve the five I's:
inform, inquire, influence, instruct and
incite.
•Focus your content. Don't let unnecessary
ideas intrude on your principal message.

5. The To: line
•The To line and the Subject line are
integrated. Each individual on the To
line is responsible for taking the
action (or part of an action) outlined
on the Subject line and the message
relates directly to them.

6. The Cc: line
•No action or response is expected of
individuals on the Cc line. The
recipient needs only to read or file
the message.
•The individuals whose work is
indirectly affected by the
communication should be included
on the Cc line.

7. Bcc: line
•Use Bcc field sparingly.
•In general, it's best not to use the
Bcc line to slyly escalate matters.
There is always a chance that the
individual on the Bcc line could hit
"Reply All" and unintentionally reveal
that the matter was escalated. 

8. Subject: line
•Subject line should effectively summarize
the message. If the subject-line is clearly
written, each recipient on the To line will
have a clear understanding of the
objective that the message relates to.
•Do your readers a favour: eliminate the
word "information" from subject lines (and
from the body of your message as well).
Consider: Subject: information
Please send me information about IIPL.
Any idea as to what the person wants to
know about?

9. Salutations
•Do not use "Sir" or "Mr." unless absolutely certain
that your correspondent is male.
•It is safer to use "Ms." instead of "Miss" or "Mrs."
•Beware of using a diminutive ( Chris, or Bob) if you
aren't certain your correspondent uses it. It might
rankle Judith to be called Judy; Robert might hate
being called Bob.
•If you are addressing a group of people, you can say
"Dear" plus the unifying attribute. For example:
Dear Project Managers: Or:
Dear Team Members:

10. Salutations
•Be careful about cultural differences. In
United States, you can usually get away
with a first name, but Germans are quite
formal; they can work side-by-side for
years and never get around to a first-name
basis. Starting a message to Germany with
“Dear Hans” might be a bad idea.
•"Good Morning" and "Good Afternoon" don't
make sense with email, as the sun may
have moved significantly by the time your
correspondent gets around to it.

11. Identification
•When you send email to someone who doesn't
know you, immediately answer these
questions:
•Who are you?
•How did you learn of your correspondent?
•What do you want from your correspondent?
•Why should your correspondent pay attention
to you?
If you can't answer the last question, consider
whether you should even send the email.

12. Identification
•Here is a ideal message which answers all the
questions mentioned earlier:
Dear Ms. Kulkarni:
I am an editor at Penguin Publishing
Company, Inc. I sat next to your brother at
Inox last week, and he mentioned that you are
interested in publishing a book based Indian
recipes. I would be very interested in receiving
a proposal from you.

13. Composing the content…
•Remove Pronouns: Imagine getting a
response on Monday to some email that
you can't quite remember sending on
Friday.
I talked to them about it the other day,
and they want to see the other one before
they make up their minds.
•Your response would probably be the
highly articulate, "Huh???"

14. Composing the Content
•The most important step in e-mail message
is to identify the type of action that the
recipient has to take after reading your
message.
•If multiple individuals are responsible for
different actions, clearly indicate who is
responsible for what.
• Always include due dates for each action.

15. Composing the Content
•The four most common types of actions are:
•Action  recipient has to perform a physical action.
Ex: "Provide a proposal for a 5% reduction in Travel
& Entertainment."
•Respond  recipient needs only to respond to your
message. Ex: “Can you attend the staff meeting on
Friday?"
•Read Only  recipient needs only to read your
message. Ex: “Please read the attached sales plan
before next staff meeting on Dec 12th."
•FYI Only  recipient needs only to file your message
for future reference. Even reading the message is
optional. Ex: "Enclosed for your records are your
completed.

16. Composing the Content
•Do not write in CAPITALS.
WRITING IN CAPITALS MAKES IT SEEM AS IF
YOU ARE SHOUTING. This can be highly
annoying and might trigger an unwanted
response in the form of a flame mail.
Never send any email with all text in
capitals.
• Do not overuse Reply to All.
Only use Reply to All if you really need
your message to be seen by each person
who received the original message.

17. Composing the Content
•In business emails, do not use
abbreviations such as BTW (by the way)
and LOL (laugh out loud). The same goes
for emoticons, such as :-).
•Keep language gender neutral. Apart from
using he/she, you can also use the neutral
gender: ''The user should add a signature
by configuring the email program”.
•It is important to add disclaimers to your
internal and external mails. This can help
protect your company from liability.

18. Composing the Content
•Answer all questions, and pre-empt further
questions.
•Create templates for frequently used
responses and save them as drafts.
•Avoid long sentences, and long mails.
•Provide all supporting information that
will help the recipient complete an action
or respond successfully.

19. Signatures
•Whenever a piece of contact
information changes, make sure your
signature updated accordingly.
•Using artwork, philosophical sayings,
jokes, and/or quotations in signature
is ok, but don't overdo it. A good
heuristic is to keep your signature at
or under five lines long.
•Change your signature every once in
a while.

20. Attachments
•Compress large attachments and
send attachments only when they
are absolutely necessary.
•Have a good virus scanner in place.
People will not be very happy with
mails full of viruses.

21. Before Sending…
Use proper spelling, grammar &
punctuation.
•Improper spelling, grammar and
punctuation give a bad impression,
and can sometimes even change the
meaning of the text.
•Read the email through the eyes of
the recipient before you send it.

22. Replies
•Answer swiftly.
Each e-mail should be replied to
within at least 24 hours, and
preferably within the same working
day.
•If the email is complicated, send an
email saying that you have received
it and that you will get back to
them. This will put the people’s
mind at rest and usually they will
then be very patient!

23. Replies
•Respond only to messages that
require one. When replying make sure
that you are adding value to the
conversation, truly moving it forward.
  
•While replying to an e-mail message
with an attachment, which is to
accompany your reply, you must
forward the message instead of using
the "Reply" or "Reply All" button.
Otherwise, the attachment is not
included with the message.

24. Replies
•Don't leave out the message thread.
•Include the original mail in your reply. In
other words, click 'Reply', instead of 'New
Mail'.
•Instead of sending email that says:
yes
Say:
> Did you get all the design documents > that you
needed?
yes

25. E-Mail Ethics
•Overuse of the high priority option will
make it lose its function when you really
need it.
•Don't send or forward emails containing
libelous, defamatory, offensive, racist or
obscene remarks, even if they are meant
to be a joke.
•Do not use email to discuss confidential
information.
•In short, If you don't want your email to be
displayed on a bulletin board, don't send
it.

26. E-Mail Ethics
•Don't forward virus hoaxes and chain
letters. By forwarding chain-mails, you use
valuable bandwidth. May a times, virus
hoaxes contain viruses themselves.
•Don't reply to spam.
Replying to spam or unsubscribing confirms
that your email address is 'live'. It will only
generate even more spam. Just hit the
delete button or use email software to
remove spam automatically.

27. E-Mail Ethics
•Watch out for "flame mail."   Read (and
reread) your mail to remove emotion
before you hit "Send." Your impatience or
irritation can affect the tone of the
message.
•Work out disagreements one-on-one,
either in person or by phone.   Evaluate if
e-mail is the right medium for handing
matter. Would a phone call or face-to-face
meeting be more appropriate? Handling
situations that are emotionally charged via
e-mail often escalates the conflict.

28. Think twice, send once
•E-mail being an important communication
tool, it is likely that the volume of
messages you send and receive will only
increase in the future.
•Pausing for thought before responding will
help ensure a professional, focused, and
successful communication and in addition,
reduce the amount of e-mail you send and
receive.
•That's worth taking a little extra time for,
don't you think?

29. Be Concise, Be Precise
•To paraphrase a quote by Professor
William Strunk Jr., the renowned
authority on English usage:
•"An e-mail should contain no
unnecessary words, and no
unnecessary attachments , for the
same reason that a drawing should
have no unnecessary lines and a
machine no unnecessary parts."

30. Looking forward to your comments/criticism …
[email protected]