Thanks for visiting. I thought I’d share, and hopefully inspire others to employ, some of the email conventions that I find useful. These are conventions for sent mail. In future I may share some of my Mac Mail.app organization tips.
Use the Subject Line Productively
Email subjects have a tendency to be vague, while emails tend to be requests for specific information. It can make your readers inbox a lot easier to understand if you include a fair amount of the question of the email in the subject line. I find that virtually all emails I send can fit all the needed information in the subject line. You’ll note also my use of the “|” character to preserve John’s Re: subject. Bars and slashes can be very useful in breaking up information in the subject line and keeping it nicely readable.
Use ONLY the subject line
Some emails have such simple requests they don’t need a message body. EOM for End of Message, or NB for No Body are common codes for this kind of message. This also reinforces the above point. A common email might have the Subject “Bhabha Citation” with the text “Could you send me that Bhabha citation?” Such small messages can be a lot easier to handle if you can respond to them without even having to open them in your mail client.
Death to Carbon Copies!
I admit that this is a nerdy pet-peeve of mine. There is no real difference, as far as I’ve discovered, between emailing a message to multiple addresses and cc’ing people to a message. Replying to either such message will reply to the sender only, while reply–all replies to everyone who received it.
The “Whoops! I need to reply-all” problem
How often have we quickly hit “Reply” to such a message, only to realize too late that everyone else on the email needs to see it as well. Putting all of your readers in the “To” field makes them easy to find in such a flub. The “To” header is almost always displayed first in a message, so its easy to copy all the addresses to which it was sent and paste them into your reply. “CC” headers are sometimes displayed and sometimes not. They require digging. Besides, group emails should be egalitarian. Who feels the love from the messages they were “CC’d”?
Extra Nerdy Solution to the “Whoops! I needed to reply-all” problem.
If, like me, the “reply-all” problem afflicts you often enough to want to spare the pain from others, there is another trick you can use. Most email clients will let you set a “Reply To” field. This affects who will be targeted in a reply, so placing the group sent in this field means that the group will, by default, receive all the replies.
I hope this has helped to you understand my strange email habits, and perhaps given you food for thought. Let me know if you’d like any more email tips.
Peace!
