Email Netiquette

General Email etiquette email

Check authenticity before Forwarding email

Look up your message in some of the links at the Hoaxes page before forwarding email which asks you to send it to all your friends.

Line length

Set your email client's automatic word wrapping feature to something between 65 and 75 characters to make sure your messages do look good in every email program on every computer.
Note: It's better to let your mail program wrap than to try and type returns yourself. If you type your own returns at the end of lines and make tham longer than your default line length you will end up with a choppy text with alternating long and short lines.
e.g. If you type:

  Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country.<RETURN>
  A second line after hitting the return key.

Your message will end up like:

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their
country.
A second line after hitting the return key.

Attachments

Attachments are great for sending things other than text or html. E.g. Word processing documents, spread sheets, pictures, songs, compressed collections of files (.zip)... However, the recipient must have program and correct version to open them, so agree with the recipient about the format of an attachment before you send it.
E.g. some Dell computers shipping in 2004 had Word Perfect instead of MS Office.
Attachments also cause extra steps of download and opening another program to view them, which take up bandwidth, disk space and processing time.
There are size limitation on attachments depending on the mail server you are using (e.g. hotmail, yahoo, comcast, aol, ...)

Plain Text vs HTML

Some email programs are not capable of rendering the HTML used for rich formatting in email messages. Others try, but fail, rendering your message unaccessible to the recipient. When in doubt send plain text.

• Thou shalt include a clear and specific subject line.
• Thou shalt edit any quoted text down to the minimum thou needest.
• Thou shalt read thine own message thrice before thou sendest it.
• Thou shalt ponder how thy recipient might react to thy message.
• Thou shalt check thy spelling and thy grammar.
• Thou shalt not curse, flame, spam or USE ALL CAPS.
• Thou shalt not forward any chain letter or virus warning.
• Thou shalt not use e-mail for any illegal or unethical purpose.
• Thou shalt not rely on the privacy of e-mail, especially from work.
• When in doubt, thou shalt save thy message overnight and reread it in the light of the dawn.

Terms/Abbreviations/Emoticons:

BTW	Buy the way
IMHO	In my humble (or honest) opinion
FYI	For Your Information
LOL	Laugh out loud
NRN	No Reply Necessary
SIM	Subject is message
TIA	Thanks in advance
TTFN	Ta ta for now
DQMOT	Don't Quote Me on This
BRB	Bee Right Back
:-)	smiling and generally happy
:-|	indifferent and generally indifferent
:-(	frowning and generally unhappy
;-)	winking and generally witty

Others at: Sandra's Backyard

Attachments:
Here are some tips to consider before attaching a document.

• Title the document that you are attaching in a way that is easy for the recipient to find once he or she downloads it to his or her files. For example, if you are sending a document that is a goal statement then title it "goalstatement.doc."
• In the content of your email, tell your recipient what type of software was used to create the document, the year/version, and the title of the attachment. For example: "The file attached is called goalstatement.doc and it is in MSWord 2000."
• Make sure that you do not send overly large attachments unless you are sure that your recipient's Internet connection and email client can handle them. For example, a user on a 56K dialup would have to spend a long time downloading a 5M PowerPoint file, whereas a co-worker on a fast work connection would have no problem.
• Don't send unnecessary attachments -- if you've already presented all of the relevant information in an email message, don't attach a Word document repeating the same information