# Email Best Practices

#### May 28, 2014

email is a 20 year old technology, though because of its simplicity and usefulness,
has stayed pretty consistent and still highly used all these years.  but because
it's simple, there have been many usage patterns or mores that have grown about
email and i will highlight some of the best practices, though this is more focused
towards company (not personal) email:

Angry Email
-----------
Tone is hard to infer through email often times, so if you have something very
personal to say, say it in person, don't send email.

Email Can Always Be Forwarded
-----------------------------
A good rule of thumb is to never write anything you wouldn't want forwarded
because most likely it will, this is a perfect example of murphy's law and
goes along with the previous best practice.


Too Many Replies
----------------
If an email has more than 3 replies or threads, then it's no longer effective,
email is supposed to be simple, asynchronous, and fast, there's free text format
so you have enough space to put down your thoughts.  if you're going back
and forth with multiple replies then that means the medium has lost its
effectiveness and you probably should pick up the phone and talk.

Thank You Replies
-----------------
I really dislike receiving thank you emails, it's not that I don't like being
praised or recognized for my efforts, but I get on order of 50-100 emails a day,
this just adds to the number and the processing time to get to the meat of the
matter in my day.  I kind of like the social way of doing things by clicking
a thanks or like button.

Email Groups
------------
If you're a part of an email group, you have the responsibility to be a good
citizen within the group.  I often times see people reply all for things
like thank you emails.  Leverage the bcc feature.

Call out Bcc
------------
Not sure what the original use case was in mind for bcc, it's definitely quite
stealthy, but if you bcc someone for the effect of not wanting to get spam via
people that reply all, you should also mention who you're bcc'ing.

Adding or Removing Users
------------------------
Ever get an email reply where someone was silently added to the list and then
because you didn't know, replied with something that you shouldn't have?  You
should always note changes to added or removed people in an email thread.

Epic Emails
-----------
Even though email is asynchronous and there are no real limitations to length
of email, but it shouldn't be used to write lengthy articles, people can
certainly ignore these emails, but with the increase in smartphones, these are
just not sane.  there are better mediums for these types of things like blogs
which could certainly be referenced via email.


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