Keeping your good name in the electronic community will be easier if you follow some of these rules, gathered from various e-mail etiquette Web Sites.
1. Omit the emoticons: Yes they're cute :-) and their little faces can relay emotions such as surprise :-D or the urge to grow a curly mustache :-{) But know when to give it a rest, or you might make someone angry :-(
2. TURN OFF THE CAPS LOCK: WRITING YOUR E-MAIL IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING AT THE RECIPIENT.
3. lay off of the little guys: it's just as annoying, however, to read e-mails in all lower case
4. If you've got it, use it: Don't set up an account, e-mail all your friends to tell them, and then drop off the face of the Internet. Nothing is more annoying than trying to communicate electronically with someone who checks mail once a month.
5. Exactly: If your only response to someone's e-mail is "Exactly," or "Thanks" or "I agree," don't respond at all. It's irritating, not to mention anti-climactic, to waste time opening a one- or two-word e-mail that says nothing.
6. Move forward: Some people, and you know who you are, think that e-mail's main use is forwarding friends and colleagues chain letters: jokes, virus warnings and any other junk that floats into your mailbox. Don't do this. People hate it. If something is really, really funny or useful, forward it to a friend. But doing this more than once a month is too much.
7. Clean it up: And on those occasions where you decide forwards are necessary, do your friends a favor and delete all the addresses of the people previously included on the forward list. The few people who bother to read your forward won't want to wade through all that to get to the good stuff.
8. Keep your own identity: If possible, don't share an e-mail account with your spouse. Friends might not feel comfortable communicating with you openly if they think someone else may be reading the mail, and it's sometimes difficult for others to determine which spouse was the author of an e-mail from the joint account.
9. What's your point? Always include a subject line on your e-mail. If you don't, the receiver will have a hard time finding it in the mailbox should he need to read it again.
10. Hard to: follow. Don't start your message in the subject line and then continue it in the mail. An example: a subject line that says, "I was wondering," followed by an e-mail text that says, "if you got the note I sent you." This is confusing and hard to follow.
11. A little context, please: If you're responding to someone's question, try to include, in quote marks if possible, the question they asked. If the answer, for example, is "yes you can," the sender might easily have forgotten the question.
12. Don't over-reply: Learn the difference between "Reply" and "Reply to all." If someone sends a question to you and five other friends, you don't need to send your answer to him AND his five friends. It's annoying, and can be embarrassing for you.
13. Easy on the punctuation: OK already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why do so many people feel they need to overpunctuate to drive their message home??????????????????
14. Reply on top: If your e-mail program automatically places your response below the original e-mail, you should manually move it to the top to save your recipient time scrolling in search of your response.
15. BTW: FYI: Too many abbreviations can be confusing to your recipient if he or she is not in on the meaning. FWIW, you might irritate someone so much they'll decide to never, ever TTYL. (Abbreviation translation: By the way, for your information, for what's it's worth, talk to you later.)
12-21-99