I recently received an email reply to a list wherein the sender noted at the top of his email that his replies were inline with the previous sender’s text, but in blue. You know, to set them apart.
I am completely flummoxed that anyone who uses email on a daily basis has no idea what the common-sense conventions and practices of using email are, or just refuses to use them.
Here are some of my suggestions for business email. Ignore them and you may find yourself wondering why, at best, you don’t get replies to your urgent missives.
- Use an email client that understands and sends text. Not HTML, not RTF, not some wonderful format that allows you to WYSIWYG your way through decorating and emphasizing and cutesifying everything. Learn to use text.
- If you send me an HTML email, please don’t expect me to see your blue reply. As a non-member of the virus of the month club, I prefer not to indulge the world’s attempts to get me to electronically ingest any goodies that hit my inbox. HTML email is like a rat during the plague times. HTML email at work is like handing everyone you work with a rat and telling them they make great pets – during the plague times.
- If you top post, please don’t expect me to weed through the disorganized mess you’ve made of the sequence of conversation to try and divine the context of your reply, and therefore your meaning.
- Avoid emails that consist of “me too” or a single word reply while including the entire thread of conversation and your 15 line signature with the clever talking dog ASCII art. Go look up the concept of signal to noise ratio. When you send these emails, you’re the noise.
- Your email client has a quoting mechanism built into it that is likely to be able to save you from yourself, should you decide to let it. Typically the quote character is a single ‘>’ with multiples of these stacking up along the left side when quotes are nested. Don’t type in the middle of the quoted text. Seperate your reply text from the quoted text by putting a blank line or two between. If you really must reply inline, split the quotes up and again seperate your replies from the quoted text with blank lines.
- For the love of Pete, stop using Microsoft Outlook. Outlook and Outlook Express are the Dumb and Dumberer of email clients. If you insist on using Outlook, you’re opting in for the virus of the month club, as well as causing the rest of us untold headaches when your system becomes infected and spam the world with our return addresses.