I wrote this article almost a year ago. I then left it on my PDA and forgot it existed. Tonight I had a conversation with my wife about an email she received which she didn’t like the tone of. I told her it’s very difficult to judge the ‘tone’ of an email because you have no way of knowing how the email was written. You will never stop yourself from being taken aback by what you read and how you perceive it, so it’s up to the sender to make sure the recipient is in now doubt about how it is meant to be received. I call this Netiquette – the Etiquette of the Internet.

First of all lets deal with how we forward our email:

Hands up anyone who has received an email that has been forwarded and forwarded so the email is 100′s of lines long and contains all the names and email addresses of every recipient so far?

Yes, I thought so. There are lots of us. It seems a popular thing to do, however it’s actually the lazy persons way of replying to email. It also uses more bandwidth and processor time to do it. An email that starts out at 1k, can soon turn into 10 or 20k once it has been backwards and forwards a few times, especially if the senders have graphics in their email signature. And if it’s an email conversation between two people remember the email goes into their sent email folder as well as being an email in their inbox – now suddenly there are multiple incarnations of the same message and its size is growing all the time.

There are a number of things wrong with this way of emailing, here are just 3:

1. Security

Email signatures normally contain peoples name, title/position, telephone and sometimes mobile phone number. If you blindly forward an email on, that information is sent to who you forward to. A simple email I send to someone I know can easily be forwarded by them to multiple people I don’t know and suddenly they have my email address, my name, my company, my position in the company, my telephone number and what my email signature looks like. What’s to stop them sending an email purporting to come from me?

Another security issue is people forward to multiple others, and they do it by just adding more email addresses in the ‘To’ field. It works, but what happens is the email software makes a list of the recipients and dumps it in the header of the message. Now an unintended recipient has some email signatures and a long list of valid email addresses. And don’t forget the sender is in their too, that could be you.

2. Confusion

The email you send to some one has a subject and a body, the subject is a brief line about what the body content is, and the body is the message. When you reply the subject gets ‘Re:’ added before it and the original message is included with your reply. Some email programs have your message above your reply, some have it below. Almost all email programs have the ability to add ‘quoting’ to the original message and display it as a hierarchy in different colours, but most people have this facility turned of. So imagine an email that has been replied to a number of times, by people with email signatures, one of these people replies above, one of them replies below and both have their hierarchy quoting turned off – what a mess.

3. Size and Time

There are millions of emails sent every day, thousands every minute. The 20k (and growing) email sent in the example above is one of millions of others fighting their way through the internet to get to their intended target. Ever wondered why your email has gone astray? Or why its taken a while to reach the person? The web is choking on oversized content and even a small email like this is making matters worse.

What’s worse is the email software that the email is sent/replied from is having to keep track of the send, the reply, the send again etc there is more work for bigger files. The bigger the file the more the recipient has to wade through to find the bit they are interested in, this takes time to do and can result in confused replies.

Email is brilliant and I love it which is why I have invested time in making email work for me and to be as slick as possible. I have found out that if I want to reply to an email, if I highlight the bit I am replying to, only that chunk of text is included in the reply as the original message. I have found out that when I have my quoting turned on, the bit of text I am replying to gets ‘>’ added before it and the software changes its colour.

I also take time to split my replies and insert what I am saying into the original text, so it’s easy for my recipient (the original sender) to re-read what they wrote and then read my answer.

Here is an example:

Example email I might receive from a client:

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design. I do have a few questions though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

Thanks for you good work

A Client
Managing Director
Business Inc
Tel: 01234 567890

Here is how I would reply to this email

1. First I highlight the paragraph beginning ‘Thanks…’ and ending ‘…footer?’ and hit the reply button. This generates a reply email, it adds a time stamp at the top, includes the highlighted bit of text as a quoted (>) paragraph and my signature at the end. Notice I didn’t highlight the senders ‘Hi’ or their signature. My reply email looks like this:

on 31/7/08 15:00, A Client at client@businessinc.com wrote:

> Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design. I do have a few questions
> though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford
Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

. Tel:       0845 370 3459
. Mobile:  07970 250168
. web:     http://www.designconscious.com/
. Skype:  designconscious.com

2. I then start to make my replies inside the quoted paragraph and it ends up looking like this:

on 31/7/08 15:00, A Client at client@businessinc.com wrote:

> Thanks for the latest proof I really like the latest changes to the design.

Great. No problems – l’m pleased  you like it so far

> I do have a few questions though, can the column on the right be a little wider and what info do you need for the footer?

I’ll adjust the r/h column, it can go about 20px wider. For the footer I just need the company registration info and a copyright date.

Speak to you soon.

Best Regards

ICB

—————

. Ian Blackford
Owner Manager – Design conscious .com

. Tel:       0845 370 3459
. Mobile:  07970 250168
. web:     http://www.designconscious.com/
. Skype:  designconscious.com

Now when my client gets my reply it’s obvious to them what they said and what I’ve replied to. My email software is set up to track the original message and all replies, I can even set up mail rules to shuffle them into folders and change their category, but this post is about Netiquette not about mail organisation so I will leave out the advice about email management.

I’m not saying my way is right (your way might be very different) or that you should adopt my way of doing things. What I am trying to get across is it’s most important that we all tidy up our communications. Email should work well for everyone and don’t assume that other people are as good as you may be at dealing with their emails, so it may be up to you to take the responsibility to learn some netiquette.