Essential email etiquette

• Is email the best channel - would a phone call or visit be better?
• What's the subject?  Keep your subject line brief but informative 
• Keep it short.  Ideally keep your emails to five sentences so people can deal with them quickly. If you need to send a longer email, you may need a summary paragraph at the start.
• Be careful who you send it to. Who really needs to read this email? Use the Reply button, not Reply to all, and keep the number of people in the CC line to a minimum.
• Change the subject. If you are replying to an email, but have changed the topic, make sure you change the subject line as well.
• One subject per email. You should only have one topic per email, so that the subject line is always relevant to the contents of the message.

Will your message cause offence or be ambiguous?

Write simply and be cautious with humour. When talking to someone face to face or by phone, you can change your tone immediately if you sense misunderstanding. With an email message, you have to guess how the other person will feel when they read it — they may be having a bad day 

Should your message be treated as confidential?

If your message is confidential, make this clear at its start. Otherwise, your recipient may forward your message to other people, and an opinion you thought you were expressing in private becomes a published statement!  This can have serious consequences if you are using email to express an opinion about a person or about their work. 

Aids to readability 

Using short paragraphs helps on-screen readability. Huge chunks of solid text are daunting, and obscure any structure in your ideas. The white space above and below a paragraph also gives a visual cue to your reader. 

Should you mark your message ‘important’? 

Your recipients may not feel it is important, even if you do. Use it sparingly. Otherwise people may defiantly postpone reading your email, out of irritation. 

Forward a message to others?

• Think carefully before forwarding a message to other people.
• Do you feel that the message content is private?
• Does the sender imply that you may share it?
• Often, an email message includes an automatic disclaimer to stating that the content is for your eyes only, as the first recipient.

Preserve the thread

When you reply, include the original message text. This is automatic unless you switch it off. It gives the historical ‘thread’ and is helpful to your reader, especially where there has been a lengthy discussion with several contributors.

Use precise distribution

Avoid using a much wider list than you need. Some people on that list would probably regard your email as Spam! Often, there will be an existing but narrower list that you can use, adding a few extra names to your message to get the coverage you need. If there is no distribution list that matches your intended audience, you can create your own or request that a new public list is created.

Privacy and security

Email is not a completely secure medium.  Within the University, there are various measures in place to help keep the data network secure. Even so, you should not send highly sensitive information by email unless it has been encrypted - see the Information Protection Policy on the IT website.

Use an Expiry Date

When you set an expiry date on a message, it will be deleted from the recipients Inbox on that date if it is unread.  If the recipient does read the message and leaves it in the inbox, it appears with a strikethrough. 

This could be useful especially over holiday periods.  Using expiry dates means that you don’t have to sort through messages which are no longer relevant upon your return from leave.  So all those messages that you get informing you of works going on whilst you’re away would be removed from your inbox automatically if the sender included an expiry date.

To set an expiry date in Outlook 2013: 

• In the New message window, click the Options tab.
• From the More Options group, click the Message Options button (downward pointing arrow in the bottom right of the group). The Properties dialog box will open. 
• Tick Expires after: and choose a date and time.
• Close the window and send the message in the normal way.