With email, you can't assume anything about a sender's location, time, frame of mind, profession, interests, or future value to you. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your receivers some context when sending email messages. This page will give specific strategies for doing so.

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IDENTIFICATION

People may make assumptions about your maturity and formality level based on your login name, return address, or username. Your correspondent will probably take Jane_White@hotmail.com more seriously than webqueenie@hotmail.com.

When you send email, particularly to someone who doesn't know you, it would be good if you would immediately answer these questions:

• How did you learn of your correspondent?
• What do you want from your correspondent?
• Who are you?
• Why should your correspondent pay attention to you? (If you can't answer this question, you should wonder if you should even send the email.)

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SIGNATURES

Many email programs allow you to set up a default signature to be included at the end of every outgoing  message. People will often use these signatures as an easy way to provide their name and alternate ways of reaching them. For example:

Such an extensive amount of signature information in contrast to such a short question is probably not necessary. It may be useful to consider having several signatures: one for personal messages, one for communication with instructors, and one for professional messages such as those for employment or internships. The following example gives adequate information without being excessive:

A signature can be set up to be automatically included in all outgoing messages or it can be manually added to only certain messages. After setting up a signature that is included automatically, it is easy to forget about it. (After all, your email software might not show it to you, or it might be so routine that you never look at it again.) So whenever a piece of contact information changes, make sure to revisit your signature to make sure that it is still up-to-date.

Signatures are also a  good way to let your correspondent know that all of the message was transmitted properly. There is no body language to signal that you are "done talking" and, unfortunately, email transmissions sometimes get interrupted.

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USEFUL SUBJECT LINES

The subject line

• should be brief
• does not need to be a complete sentence
• should clearly pertain to the contents of the message

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ATTACHMENTS

Some mailers support "attachments", where you can specify a document to send through email. This allows people to share essentially any file in any format. GIF-encoded images, JPEG-encoded images, Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Photoshop files, Excel spreadsheets, and executable files are just a few of the types of documents that can be sent.

If your correspondent has a mail reader that can handle attachments, this can work very well: a long attachment can be looked at later. However, if your correspondent's email software doesn't understand attachments and you send a non-text file (like a Word document, a binary, a picture, or even compressed text), be advised that it will appear as lots of garbage. Pages and pages of garbage, usually.

Even if your correspondent has email software that understands what attachments are, they still have to have software to read the document. Think of it this way: somebody can use the Post Office to send you any kind of document. But if you send someone microfilm, they probably won't be able to read it. Even executable programs can't always be useful to your correspondent. Macintosh programs won't run on Microsoft Windows machines; Windows95 programs will not run on machines that only have DOS installed.

Furthermore, even if your correspondents can receive and view the attachment you send them, if they are low on disk space or dial in from home to get their email, they will not be happy to receive a 200MB video, no matter how funny it is.

Please email your correspondents first and ask them if they can handle a large attachment of that format.

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QUOTING DOCUMENTS

If you are referring to a previous email message, you should explicitly quote the original message  to provide context. Instead of sending an email that simply says yes, use a message as follows:

The greater-than sign (>) is the most conventional sign to indicate a quote from another email message, but your email software may use a different convention.

Even if there are a fair number of words in your response, you still might need to quote the original message. Imagine getting a response on Monday to some email that you can't quite remember sending on Friday:

Your response as you read this message would probably be the highly articulate, "Huh???" It would be much easier for you to understand an email that said:

You need only enough context to frame the question being answered.

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FORMATTED TEXT

Some email software only understands plain text. Italics, bold, and color changes will show up as control sequences in the text. You might send something like:

But if your correspondent's software can't handle formatting, the message could show up as:

Web documents are particularly difficult to read with older email programs. You may have a choice of sending the web page as text or as HTML; keep your correspondent's capabilities in mind when you make that choice.

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EMPHASIS

Light Emphasis

If you want to give something mild emphasis, you should enclose it in asterisks. This is the moral equivalent of italics in a paper document. Compare the following three messages:

Which of the above you choose depends upon whether you are adamant about the commitment you made or adamant that you didn't mean Wednesday.

Strong Emphasis

If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation marks. Instead of:

Say:

Note that you should use capital letters sparingly. Just as loss of sight can lead to improved hearing, the relative lack of cues to emotion in email makes people hyper-sensitive to any cues that might be there. Thus, capital letters will convey the message that you are shouting.

It is totally inappropriate to use all capital letters in a situation where you are calm. Don't do this:

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Credits:  All information on this page was revised from "A Beginner's Guide to Effective E-mail" as allowed by copyright notice on that site. The original publication was developed by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood.