(Article originally written for 50 Plus Lifestyle Magazine)
Email Etiquette
Email has really revolutionized communication throughout the world, allowing people to maintain a dialog (and share files) over long distances and involving multiple participants, without the time pressure of long distance charges or waiting through silences while considering responses. Like any communications medium, however, effective emailing necessitates being mindful of some simple principles of internet etiquette (“netiquette”) to avoid misunderstandings and hard feelings.
When using email, it is best to remember the Golden Rule and only treat others the way you’d expect to be treated. Remember that there is a person with feelings on the other end and not just a faceless computer screen. Ask yourself, “Would I be saying this to someone if they were standing in front of me?”.
The biggest problem with making sure your email is not being taken the wrong way is remembering that the written word lacks the more subtle verbal and non-verbal communication cues normally present in direct conversation. Read through your message before you send it and try to imagine yourself as some other person who can’t hear the inflection and underlying intention of your message. If you are still in doubt, have someone else read it first. Be careful with humor. What may seem hilarious to you may come across as annoying or even offensive to someone else.
Stay out of verbal confrontations with others that descend into personal attacks (called flaming). Remember that what you may say in an email about someone else will likely get read by others who you hadn’t anticipated would get it. Name-calling, swearing, criticizing, and belittling reflect worse on the character of the sender than on the recipient. Try imagining how your grandmother would react to your message if she were to read it. If you feel you’ve been slighted in an email, try to keep your responses matter-of-fact and focus on how the message impacted you rather than what is wrong with the sender. Avoid typing in all capital letters. It is harder to read and is considered the email equivalent of shouting.
Try to be considerate of differences in internet connection. You may have a speedy DSL or cable internet connection that allows you to download photo and video attachments with ease, but someone you may forward those bulky emails to may still be on a much slower dial-up connection, resulting in a frustrating wait for the email and attachments to download with the phone line tied up. In general, it is best to find out first if attachments of any kind are going to be welcomed.
Along those same lines, try to keep email forwarding to a level that you are sure is welcome. It can be very tempting to share entertaining and humorous email or attachments with friends and family, but the volume of it may be viewed as mostly a nuisance to at least some recipients. If someone is sending these kinds of email gems to you, it is probably a good bet they don’t mind getting them. If you are not sure, it is probably best to just ask. Forwarding virus warnings and email petitions or chain letters is more often than not a waste of email bandwidth, and likely helping someone spread hoaxes or phishing scams (which are attempts to get someone to divulge personal information under false pretenses).
Be aware that email sent with a long list of recipients showing in the “To” field may eventually land in a spyware-infected computer that will send all those email addresses to spammers. If you like to participate in forwarding interesting and humorous emailed gems to friends and family (as most of us do), remember to include recipients by listing them all in the “Bcc” (Blind Carbon Copy) field instead. That way, they will all get the email, but none of the recipients will see who else received it. Politely suggesting to others who forward stuff to you that they might also want to make this a practice may sound rude, but it will help cut down the amount of spam we all receive.
When replying to an email, it is good to quote the original message so that everyone knows what you are talking about. Some email programs are set that way by default, but others (AOL for instance) require some setting changes to allow that in every reply. Much to-do is made by some about where to post a reply to an email, either on top of or below the original. Some insist the reply should follow the original because the chronological order of the messages would be maintained, but it is probably not critical as long as it is clear where the original stops and the reply starts. Sprinkling bits of the reply throughout the text of the original message can be confusing.
For more detailed information on netiquette, readers are encouraged to visit the following websites:
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/