Whether in business or in daily communications, email can be a huge benefit to our daily lives. The problem with email, however, is that most people don’t understand basic email etiquette. When you are emailing your BFF forever, you can use pretty much anything you want to get your points across.
When you are emailing a client or contemporary, you might want to tone it down a bit. Email is an effective tool at getting information from one place to another, but it can just as easily make a bad impression too. Here are five things that drive me nuts in email communications:
Dude! I CAN HEAR YOU!
If you type in all caps, they can probably hear you in space. All caps equals YELLING in emails and it is universally frowned upon. If you send me an email in all caps, I am about ninety five percent more likely to erase without reading. All caps is also very hard on some people’s eyes...turn it down a notch!
Keep it brief
Emails are meant to be brief and informative. If you have to use six million words to say a simple thing, chances are the person that is reading those six million words will get sick of it and skip to the end of the email….Then they might miss the entire purpose of those six million words and not get the point of the long and winding message at all. You should never word an email in such a manner because it…..get the point?
Leave the text speak in the phone
It might shock you to know that not everyone out there knows what OMG, TTYL and ROFL means. If you send a ton of that text speak in a message to me, my mind might just explode. Don’t leave me over here trying to figure out a bunch of letters when a simple sentence would do just fine. Type it out with your lazy fingers, people!
Who has my email again?
Newsflash...if you send a bulk email out and leave the addresses in the top of the email, everyone will have all those addresses. Chances are there are going to be some folks that are upset about such a development. People protect their email these days very carefully and you would be wise to respect that. If I trust you with my email and you misuse it, I have been known to do very bad things. Don’t ask what they are...
Don’t send me junk mail
This one is similar to the one above but it has even worse implications. You sending me junk mail is kind of like someone sending me a rattlesnake in the mail. Junk mail is eventually going to bring malware or viruses. I will delete you quickly before I go through such a hardship for a funny picture of an old lady farting in cartoon-speak.
Save it for Facebook and Pinterest where I can see it at someone else’s risk.
These are five of the more prominent irritations I encounter with email. What others can you think of?