Email etiquette to help you communicate better with your audience and stop making the no no's that turn people off and stop them opening your email.

1. Email Etiquette
I’m sure “Miss Manners" has a list of the proper ways of doing anything, from greeting a
person for the first time, eating with the right fork and the pros and cons of proper email
etiquette.
Just type and send, easy…right? Well there ARE some things to consider when
sending an email.
First of all, keep it short, there is no contest here to win the Pulitzer Prize. Consider a
quick verbal phone message and get to the point quickly.
A “Bang” is what the computer world refers to as an exclamation point. Adding more
than one to the end of your written sentence does not increase the importance of the
written word.
If you need to send an attachment, keep it under 5MB. If you know that your recipient
still deals with a dial up connection, then 1MB would be the maximum limit to any type
of attachment. Large attachments will fill of an email box and bounce (or block) other
important messages that trying to get through.
Use your “reply to all” feature only when you your response is relevant to everyone.
You do not want to use the “reply to all” feature, when ONLY the original sender needs
to see your response.
Adding a Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) should be used rarely, and only in a situation when
someone needs proof, that a certain email was sent or when a particular party wishes to
remain anonymous. When you, as the BCC, reply to an email, you have now revealed
yourself, and the entire practice was an exercise in futility.
Privacy? Not likely via email. There are some systems where the program
administrator has access to every email. If this is the situation with your operating
system, I would hope that the person in this position is honest.
Software, no matter how sophisticated, may have a glitch now and then, including email
software. When this happens, you can inadvertently receive a notice that was not
intended for your eyes or something that you sent may end up in the wrong inbox.
Offices have been known to monitor the emails that are sent from any computer within
their corporation. They want to know that all employees are focusing on the task at
hand, and not sending or answering personal emails. Another reason that companies
monitor email activity is to protect any corporate secrets, and that there are no “moles”
or “traitors” within their own company environment.
Private emails just don’t exist, no matter how much we want to believe this fallacy. If
something is truly personal, I suggest sending it snail mail or have it hand delivered.
As a last note about Email Etiquette, due to the fact that we have established that
emails are not private, you want to keep the information you write in your subject line
very general. You do not want to put anything there that will peak the curiosity of
others.