E-mail Etiquette

BlueSkySearch receives hundreds of E-mail letters every day; they arrive in all shapes and sizes along with bloopers, blunders and E-mail surprises!   Most of these surprises confirm the decline and fall of even the most rudimentary principles of literary grammar. E-mail grammar has seemingly succumbed to the will of the Great Unwashed who have ordained that "No Rules Apply".   

E-mail has rapidly become one of the premier methods of communication throughout the world.  It’s fast, usually reliable and virtually free.  Most companies large or small are now using it for interoffice communications, friends and family use it to keep in touch, and job seekers use it to transmit resumes when they apply for jobs.  Regardless of its purpose, E-mail is communication and if not used properly, email can easily communicate the wrong impression to the recipient - the sender must be completely illiterate, ignorant, or worse, just downright rude. To help avoid these perceptions, we thought we would offer a few tips on proper E-mail Etiquette for the Great Unwashed.

E-mail is not a Post-It note – When E-mail is used as an abbreviated Post-It note, oftentimes the recipient perceives the message as being curt or bluntly rude. Anyone who has ever attended high school and especially college was taught the basics of proper letter writing and format. Anyone who has ever been in business knows the proper format for a letter or an interoffice memo. Just because we’re typing onto a TV screen doesn’t mean we should abandon all that education and experience.

E-mail gets there in an Instant – Since the message is going to be transmitted at the Speed of Light, the sender has a few extra moments to construct a better and more meaningful letter. E-mail will save anywhere from two to five days time compared to regular US Mail. We should all slow down and take a little extra time. It makes a better impression on the receiving end.

Grammar and Spell Checker – Most E-mail servers have these features and they should be used, because we know it takes way too much time to look at the Dictionary anymore. Nothing makes a worse impression than poor grammar and misspelled words. And that’s the truth!

Not Worth It? – A poorly written, or abbreviated E-mail sends the message that the sender didn’t care enough about the recipient to bother wasting any time on him or her. Gee, I feel so special!

Proof Read – Take a moment to proof read before you hit the Send button. After the E-mail has been sent, it’s gone! He who hesitates is not lost, check it again.

Is It Important Enough to Send the Very Best? – If so, it never hurts to also print out the letter on good quality stationery and mail it as well as E-mailing it. E-mail gets deleted very easily, and after a few days, E-mail deletes itself!

Don’t CC the World – Many people make the mistake of CC’ing too many people and letting the other names show. On most E-mail, you can use (parentheses) to mask the other multiple recipients. If not, some of the recipients will get upset because their E-mail addresses have been exposed to others without their consent. Besides that, multiple recipients never feel very "special".

Use Salutations and Proper Closings - Something like Dear Mr. Peabody or Dear Sir is preferred over just starting the letter, or saying something like Yo Dude! And never ever misspell a person’s name if it can be avoided. End every letter with a Sincerely, or Yours Truly or something similar and close with your name even though it appears on the E-mail letterhead. ‘Tis proper! You can also setup Letterheads on your email just like on real life stationary.

Attach but Don’t Paste Documents Inside E-mail - Pasted documents lose their format and will appear disjointed on the receiving end. It is always better to "Attach" documents to E-mail because the format will be preserved and the document can be automatically downloaded into the recipient’s word processing program for better printing and saving.

Don’t Transmit Computer Viruses – If your computer has been acting strangely, odds are it’s been infected with some kind of computer virus. If you send an E-mail, you will also send the virus and this could mess up the recipient’s computer as well. That doesn’t make a very good impression of course. A lot of computers have a Virus Scan on incoming E-mail and they will automatically know who sent the infected E-mail to them. That has a tendency to upset people.

Never Convey Feelings of Anger – Some people in business make the mistake of chewing someone out with an E-mail and essentially, telling them off. Now here’s an interesting subject! E-mail can be saved, copied, forwarded and printed. And it can and will be used against the sender. The same goes for voice mail. I’ve seen a lot of bulldogs get sent to the dog pound for making this sometimes fatal mistake.

Never Ever Use Profanity – The only thing worse than hearing profanity is seeing it in print. It’s not macho, it’s ignorance. There are plenty of other adverbs, adjectives and nouns in the English language that can be used to convey meaning. And don’t give me the old line that profanity is standard jargon in the Produce Industry because it’s been a male dominated industry. You better take another look around because the ladies are kicking the doors open and they won’t tolerate profane behavior in the workplace.

Is the E-mail Address Correct? – These E-mail addresses with all their symbols and @ signs and dots and dashes can get pretty complicated. The address has to be perfect and correctly entered or the E-mail will never reach its intended destination. "Gee, I wonder why they’ve never replied to my E-mail?" On many email setups you can choose to receive an auto reply that the message was delivered as intended.

We should all slow down and take our time – E-mail gives us a few extra moments before our message is zapped across cyber space at the speed of light.

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