E-Mail Etiquette

From TCPwiki

From Main Page / Work Place and Business Etiquette

The email rules are:

• Check with your employer about ownership of electronic mail as ownership Laws vary.
• Assume that mail on the Internet is as secure as a regular mail postcard.
• Respect copyright.
• When forwarding or reposting do not change the wording and only repost to a group with permission and attribution.
• Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet.

• Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive.
• Do not send heated messages ("flames") even when provoked and do not respond if you get flamed.
• Check that a you have not received a revocation email before responding and ensure you respond only to message directed to you.
• Include a one or two line contact information signature at the end of your message.
• Address mail carefully in particular when a single address is a distribution group.
• Do not continue to include unnecessary CC recipient when you are having a two-way conversation.
• Do not send unsolicited mail
• Remember that people are located worldwide, so do not demand immediate response from someone who is asleep before assuming the mail did not arrive.
• Before initiating long (over 100 lines) or personal discourse, verify all addresses and include the word "Long" in the subject.
• Your recipient is a human being whose culture, language, and humor have different points of reference from your own ... including date formats, measurements, and idioms. Sarcasm travels very poorly.
• Use mixed case. UPPER CASE IS SHOUTING.
• Use symbols for emphasis, *bold*, _underlined_.
• Smileys indicate a tone of voice ... use them sparingly as they will not wipe out an otherwise insulting comment.
• Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages.
• Be brief without being overly terse. When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.
• No more than 65 characters and a carriage return on each line.
• The subject must reflect the content of the message.
• Keep the signature short ... no longer than 4 lines.
• Do a "reality check" before assuming a message is valid.
• Do not send large amounts of unsolicited information to people.
• If you can forward mail, beware forwarding on several hosts so that a message sent to you gets into an endless loop.