Email Etiquette (4): Odds and Ends
This is the fourth and final part of a multi-part series. Previous posts were "Replies and Formatting," "Subjects and Attachments," and “Using the Cc and Bcc Fields.” There is also a summary.
This week has no particular focus except to deal with a few more things I thought of: email signatures, chain emails, and length of emails.
Signatures
Email signatures are good. It's nice to be able to easily find somebody's name at the bottom of their email, especially if they don't have their "from" name in their email client set to their actual name (so you get something like "From: hq723" instead of "From: Soren Bjornstad"). If somebody might want your address, phone number, or website, those are good things to put in as well. Putting your email address is a waste of space unless you're using a different address than normal: this is what the "reply" button and the email header are for.
If it's not a work email (and maybe if it is, depending on the environment), creativity is always appreciated—just don't go overboard and make it something that could potentially offend somebody. Quotes or interesting observations are always welcome. If you choose to include a quote or something similar in your signature, changing it every so often is nice; I know more than one person who has had precisely the same email signature for over five years. Even the most creative snippets tend to lose some of their luster after that long.
Don't make your email signature more than four or five lines. HTML and images are probably unnecessary. Also don't be cautious to strip your signature from your email if you're responding to a mailing list that knows perfectly well who you are or you're adding to a long chain of people adding a small amount of information to an email and sending it on. (Feel free to strip other people's signatures and "so-and-so replied:" from those emails too; nobody will ever do it if you don't take the initiative.)
Chain Emails
Do me a favor: Next time you get an email that ends by telling you that if you don't send it to ten more people your computer will explode spontaneously, don't forward it to me.
If you get an email warning you about something that actually seems important:
- Don't send it to anybody.
- It's probably completely fake.
- If you still really aren't sure whether it might be true, check out Snopes first. (Do this even if the email claims that Snopes has confirmed the veracity of its statement—Snopes is becoming well-known enough that I've seen more than one chain email/Facebook post that makes a false claim.)
- If you really received chain mail that tells the truth, you still probably shouldn't forward it to anybody. If there really is an email virus spreading like wildfire (which really doesn't happen anymore anyway), then people will learn about it on the news anyway. Do you really need to send yet another email?
Email Length
Try to avoid making your email more than a paragraph or two long. If it really needs to be longer, you should start worrying about structure. Include a paragraph or at least a line or two summarizing the email and explaining what you're going to talk about in it. If it seems appropriate, you also might consider apologizing for the length and explaining why it's as long as it is.
Why? Five-paragraph emails don't scan well. Sometimes I get a copy of an email I don't really need, and I like to be able to discard it quickly instead of wasting my time reading the whole thing. If I have a flood of email, it's nice to be able to immediately determine which emails require immediate action and which ones can wait until I've finished sifting through emails. And besides, nobody likes reading you ramble on forever about the same thing. If it's that complex a topic and it's not for mass distribution, you should probably just pick up the phone and call the other person—that will be faster anyway.
Summary
I've compiled another post that summarizes all the main ideas in all four sections of this post. Check it out, and send it on to people who annoy you with their emailing habits. :-)