Guidelines: E-Mail Etiquette (Netiquette)

Guidelines

• DO NOT SEND MESSAGES IN CAPITAL LETTERS. It’s called “SCREAMING” and it gets very annoying very quickly. It is, however, all right to capitalize some words for EMPHASIS, but don’t get carried away.

• When you're upset with someone, the last thing you should do is to reply with an angry e-mail message. It’s called “flaming” and can lead to embarrassment, bad feelings, and worse. “Flame wars” have been known to develop to a point where they disrupted e-mail service and caused computers to crash.

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• Keep it simple. If you can say it in 10 words, say it in 10—not 11, 100 or 1,000. The longer a message is, the less likely the recipient is to read it all.
• Put blank lines—an extra carriage return or hard return—between paragraphs. Do not indent paragraphs because different systems interpret the “indent” or “tab” keys in different ways.
• If you want to forward a message, just forward the message. Get rid of the old headers and the e-mail addresses of everyone else that has ever seen the message.
• When you reply to a message, make sure the person knows what you are replying to. Many of us send and receive hundreds of e-mail messages a day and it can be hard at times to remember what specific points you made to someone, or what questions you asked. When you reply, let them know what you are replying to.
• If you use abbreviations or acronyms, make sure the people you are writing to understand them. Don’t assume that everyone does.
• Do not assume that people want to receive attachments from you, especially large ones that can tie up computer time. If you do want to send an attachment, inform them that an attachment is coming by a separate e-mail, and tell them what it contains. Many people refuse to open attachments, even from friends, unless they know it is coming, since some e-mail viruses spread by automatically sending themselves to everyone on a person’s e-mail list.
• If you are going to include hypertext links and URLs (Universal Resource Locators) let your reader know what they are for.