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It’s critical that you pay attention to the cc/bcc situation and ensure that you don’t “Reply All” when your correspondent clearly wants you to be an invisible part of the communication. Make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. “Thought you’d be interested in this” is far less useful than “Friday Meeting Time.” As our inboxes get fuller, we rely more and more on subject lines to search for relevant messages. It’s despicable, and you’ll look like a slimeball if you’re caught. Don’t ever edit another person’s email to change or obscure their meaning. Judicious (and ethical) copy and paste is your friend. Including marathon-length previous conversations. Being too longwinded.īrevity is the soul of wit, lingerie and email. It may take a few seconds longer, but only reply to the relevant folks. Using “Reply All” for every message.īefore you hit “Reply All,” ask yourself if every single person on the list really needs to see your response to the email. The same goes for grammar and punctuation. If your email service doesn’t have a built-in spell-checker, then copy and paste important emails into a word processing program that does.
Use one of them-there’s no excuse for sloppy spelling. Good heavens, there are a bazillion ways to spell-check your emails. Your inspirational quote is nothing but a nuisance to folks you email 10 times a day. Sending emails with irrelevant-or no-signature lines.Ī signature line is a critical email element, but it should only contain all the appropriate ways to reach you. Smilies are fine for communiqués from 12 year olds. If your email skills could use a little fine-tuning, take a look at these 15 email practices you should avoid at all costs: 1. I find that people are becoming increasingly intolerant of sloppy, ineffective email practices, and that the folks who handle email properly have a decided edge in business. Email has become the fundamental tool of business communication, and I don’t know a single person whose inboxes aren’t inundated with messages.Īs an increasing amount of business is conducted via email, it’s even more important to ensure that the way we send our messages actually achieves our goals.
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