Working Life > Business Behaviour > Business Emails

Business Emails: Correct Sending and Receiving

E-mailing has long replaced the writing of letters. An infinity of electronic messages are found at many workplaces. Most people complain that often meaningless and redundant information is sent. But there are few that have taken efforts in organizing this flood or reducing it. In the consequence, people frequently interrupt their work for receiving mails and tend to read office mail after work in their leisure time. A large percentage of the employed find e-mails distempering, and a stress-factor.

According to the magazine brandeins Edition 01/2008, in daily business, 30 to 40 opens of the email-inbox per hour are executed, on average. These interruptions can make the effective intelligence quotient decrease by 10 units.

Writing and sending e-mail:

• Adress the receiver of the e-mail possibly personally. Never leave out the title, this would seem contemptuous
• Do not write endless lines, but max. 70 characters a line - many e-mail programs do not display long lines clearly
• Answer your e-mails fast, if possible within 24 hours after reception
• Use short signatures (4 lines) containing your contact data. Spell out your name
• Send an attachment only if it is necessarily required. Explain briefly, in the body, why you are sending it
• Make sure that an attachment is in a format that the receiver has, too. Use PDF or DOC for text files, JPG for photos, ZIP to compress files. Also, the attachment should not be too large - many mail accounts allow only a limited size, and large attachments take more time to be downloaded.
• Double-read your e-mail before sending it, checking form and style
• Avoid abbreviations and use, like in an ordinary mail, capital letters and full punctuation
• Write clear subject lines that subsume your matter in few words. This highly increases chances that the receiver notices and reads what you write
• Remain sober functional with what you write, in business mails. Irony is not always recognized and interpreted right
• Consider if the mail you are about to send is necessary and makes sense. Maybe a phone call is more fruitful
• Plan your own fixed times for reading and answering e-mail
• Do not send HTML-mail. Normal e-mail is displayed easier and received faster
• Smilies and other emoticons can be used with persons that you know, but not at first contact
• Be polite. First welcoming, then main part and greetings. Use  "Du" only if you always say it to the receiver
• In the area TO you specify the actual receiver. A copy can be sent simultaneously through CC. If you wish your main receiver to remain unknown to the others, use BCC, for that. This option is used for keeping receivers unknown to one another. Since the e-mail adress is included in the personal data covered by the German privacy law, you should be mindful with passing on adresses.

Receiving e-mail:

• Employ a spam filter to reduce unwanted mail
• Answer mail as soon as you receive it and do not leave it unsorted in your inbox
• Do not send confirmations of receipt
• Be careful when rewarding for forwarding mails is offered and very careful with the request to pay money in order to receive a multiple of the paid after forwarding
• Mistrust contents, even if the sender is known
• Do not click on links in suspicious mails
• Do not open attachments from unknown senders or from mails with peculiar subject lines
• Do not send chain mails, they are prohibited on the web

Forwarding and answering email:

• In your answering mail, you keep the subject line, prepending a Re:
• Do not forward confidential mail to your private mail account for further processing. In most cases, that account will lack the required safety properties and you will be liable to prosecution, legally betraying your company
• When answering, write your answer above the received text, not below - this makes it easier to read. Answering long mails, quote the words that your answer refers to
• Do not answer SPAM-mail
• When forwarding, do not hange words. Private mails forward only if the sender agrees

General e-mail knowledge:

• Private use of the e-mail during the working time means severe loss to companies. For that reason, there is sometimes an employment agreement or usage regulation prohibiting private use or defining rules. Inform yourself what applies in your case
• In case of misuse of the business mail account, the employer is allowed to admonish formally, or cancel you
• The works council has a right of co determination of the general conditions
• E-mails can be read by others during transport. Important, confidential information should be coded<
• Use a virus scanner to protect your system from infections via e-mail. Do not open attachments of unknown senders. Companies, like software producers do not send updates per e-mail
• Set the font to Latin-1 (technical name ISO-8859-15) in your e-mail program, so that special characters and Umlaute are displayed right
• In forums, newsgroups, guestbooks, chats and newsletter-subscriptions, never use your personal e-mail adress, but use a second adress

• The simplest way to clear out your email inbox; zenhabits, April 20, 2009
• Ask unclutterer: Managing RSS-Feeds; Unclutterer, April 17, 2009