Ok, I lied. They’re not ordered, and there’s more than ten. Which ones have your friends plagued you with?
Here’s a list of bad email habits that annoy recipients.
- When you reply to an email, don’t hit Reply-All unless you intend to send to everyone.
For instance, when you RSVP to a party invitation, everyone who’s been invited doesn’t need to know your response.
There’s a difference between Reply and Reply-All, learn it, and use it wisely.
- You do not need to insert your response above my email and send the whole thing back to me.
When you hit reply, many mail clients copy the whole of the sender’s message so that you may reference it. Don’t whack a few returns, enter your response, and hit send. Delete the quoted message.
I can’t stress how important this is for anyone who wants to maintain a sane thread of conversation. This is especially true for replying to Internet newsgroups and mailing lists.
- Do not reply by inserting your text into the quoted text, even if you make it a separate color or font.
The most unreadable email comes when people reply to a message, and then just type after a paragraph – usually without a line break. If the recipient’s mail client can’t preserve the color or font, it becomes unclear who said what.
Those quote levels are there for a reason.
- Reply-to-reply-to-reply-to-reply…
You typically see this on mailing lists where someone responds with a short message, preserving the entire historical chain of messages up to that point. Stop it. If you see more than two levels of quotes, something is dreadfully wrong.
There’s what you’ve said, there’s what everyone else has said, there’s what you’re saying now. If you see more than two levels of quoting, someone is committing at least one of these bad habits.
- Check the To and Cc fields before you hit Reply-All
If you’ve been blind carbon copied to a message, there’s most likely a reason the sender did so — that usually involves not wanting the public recipients to know you were included.
For instance, I maintain a list of my friends’ birthdays. Quite often, I’ll send a happy birthday greeting, but BCC their other friends as a subtle reminder. When someone hits Reply-All, it lets the birthday person know that someone else had to be reminded.
Be considerate to the sender when that person trusts you by using BCC.
- Don’t attach a picture or video you found on the internet.
Attachments take up space, they make getting mail slower, they take longer to download, they chew up quota. If you found something on the Internet, send the link, not the resource itself. The recipient can then use the most efficient means of getting it.
- Learn to use image compression
If you are going to send an email with an image attachment, then at least learn to use image compression so that you have a small attachment. I can’t begin to count the number of times someone’s sent me a megabyte jpeg of something stupid.
Like the web, try to keep images down to 32K or less, if possible. Be respectful of the other person’s INBOX space.
- Learn to upload content to a server
Rather than clogging email with attachments, learn how to beam content up to a server, and then point the recipients at the content. The email will be smaller, often get there faster, not take as much space, and can be pulled from online faster.
- Keep your signature block small
I don’t need random quotes. I don’t need legal disclaimers. I don’t need ASCII pictures. I don’t need colors and fonts. I don’t need your picture. I don’t need advertisements. I don’t need a notice a virus checker was used. I don’t need your slogan. I don’t need your logo.
Plainly put, if your signature block is equal to or larger than the content of your message’s body, something’s wrong.
- Get a personal account, use it as such
I hate automated legal disclaimer blocks, especially in signatures, and even more so if they are larger than the message content.
“The information in this email is confidential,…”If you’re sending me an unsolicited personal email from your corporate email and someone thinks that legal block is somehow enforceable, forget it – you can’t just throw a legal stipulation on a person, especially if the mistake is yours. As such, I’m not bound to delete the message, either. This fluff is just annoying, and yes, most likely it comes from your work. So, get a personal account. Use it instead.
You do know your work is legally allowed to read your private mail when you use their systems, yes? That alone should scare you.
- Stop attaching your vCard on every email
If you’ve sent me your vCard, I’ve got it in my address book – I don’t need a copy with every email.
- Stop using backgrounds for the sake of backgrounds
It’s one thing if your email has some functional layout and design to it, but if you’re just sending a background for the sake of adding texture, don’t. The most common occurrence I see of this is a repeating tile of textured background. Honestly, plain white is easier to read and prints better. Let’s do without the visual noise and extra attachment overhead.
- If it’s a short message, use text mode.
Fonts, formatting, colors, and embedded images convey additional information. If you don’t need it to get your point across or add additional clarity, don’t incur the extra overhead of making an HTML message. Plain text messages are much easier to read and respond to on mobile devices.
We’ve all seen documents and adds that look busy or appear as font soup; don’t commit the same atrocities with your emails.
- Stop putting pictures in Word and PowerPoint files
I can’t count the number of times someone’s wanted to send me a few images, and was so clueless that they had to make an Office document to hold the picture. The amount of waste, inefficiency, and platform specific ties this incurs is mind boggling. I just can’t take people seriously who do this.
- Don’t blindly forward and email and not tell me why
I’m not a mind reader, I just play one on TV. Yes, the information forwarded may be pertinent, but unless you establish some kind of context, it may be perceived as junk.
Never assume the reader of your message is going to get your message in a timely manner, or will be reviewing it with the same mindset or information you have immediately at hand.
- Don’t use tiny fonts
A number of corporate emails I get arrive as HTML documents with 6 point fonts. Yes, you might have a pretty poor monitor, and it may appear big on your screen, but if you force me to read something at a fixed size, my huge monitor will render it as the microscopic text that it really is.
If you want me to read your email, make it readable.
- Run spell check
If you’re typing and a word is underlined in red, double check and fix it. Additionally, avoid cell phone abbreviations like using UR for “your.” You’re not limited to 120 characters, and you’re not being charged 10 cents per message. Use enough to be clear.
Emails are often saved, and consequently searched. If the words in your email aren’t ones entered into a search box, then you’ve made if difficult for someone to find or reference your email.