Most everyone has broken the rules of email etiquette at one time or another. We get lazy with personal email and make mistakes from rushing through corporate or business email. Both personal and business correspondence through email should be well thought out, reviewed, and spell-checked. Once that “send” button is hit, there is no retrieving it. The following will be helpful if you have not heard about the rules of email. And it will be a gentle reminder to those of you who know the rules but have become lax in your email etiquette habits.

1. Think before you send — you can’t take anything back.

• Once an email has been sent, there’s no way to unsend it. It essentially becomes a permanent written record with your name attached to it.

• Never send an email in the heat of the moment. Before you send a reply to a group email, be sure your response is suitable for all recipients. If it isn’t, you may not want to send it, period.

• Enter the recipient’s email address only after you’re finished composing an email. If you do so, you’ll avoid hasty, incomplete replies or inadvertent (and sometimes inappropriate) forwarding.

• When in doubt, don’t send.

2. Be aware that email is never private.

• Avoid sending emails with very sensitive or confidential content. Any email you send may be mistakenly forwarded to others, inadvertently left onscreen where others can read it, or printed at a public printer and accidentally left where others can see it.

• If you have to convey a sensitive or confidential message, consider using a phone call or personal meeting instead.

3. Be careful with “forward” and “reply to all.”

• Before you forward a message to others, review the full content of the email and make sure there’s nothing private in it. Keep in mind that the forward and reply features on many email programs rehash the text of previous email exchanges at the bottom of the message.

• “Reply to all” is a useful but potentially dangerous feature. Make sure you don’t inadvertently reply to all when you mean to reply only to the sender. To avoid making embarrassing mistakes, always double-check the recipient list before you send it.

4. Be careful with humor and sarcasm.

• Subtleties of body language and tone of voice, which may make something funny in person, are completely lost over email.

• Even if you use emoticons, sarcasm is difficult to convey over email and can easily result in

misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

• Crude jokes and insulting language typically have sour effects over email, no matter how well the recipient knows your sense of humor.

5. Write clearly and use standard grammar and punctuation.

• Emails essentially are letters without the ink and paper. Follow the same rules of style, grammar, and clarity that you would use in writing a real letter. Always be clear and concise.

• Reread and spell-check your email before sending to catch typos.

• Avoid excessive use of odd punctuation, even in personal emails. Using… ellipses… to no

end… distracts your recipient… and makes your email… incoherent. USING ALL CAPS IS THE EMAIL EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING AND PROBABLY ANNOYS YOUR RECIPIENT.

6. Never open suspicious emails or attachments.

• Viruses are everywhere on the internet. Emails from unknown senders may contain viruses or worms that can invade and damage your files, weaken your computer’s security, or attach themselves to your outgoing email.

7. Don’t send large attachments unless you have to.

• Some internet users have high-speed connections, but many still have dialup service, which is slow and may require hours to download a large attachment.

• Large attachments may prevent a message from going through at all. Many email servers and networks have firewalls that limit the maximum size of individual emails, and many email services (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo!) limit the size of each user’s inbox.

• IF you have to send a large attachment, warn the recipient beforehand and mention the file size in your email.

8. Be mindful of others’ software and operating systems.

• Not all email users have the same software or even the same operating system (e.g., Windows vs. Mac). Don’t automatically assume that your recipient has the same software you do and that he’ll be able to open files that you send as attachments.

• Before you send an attachment, let the recipient know what format it’s in and ask whether he’ll be able to open it.

9. Don’t use fancy colors and fonts.

• Although it may be tempting to beautify your email with formatting, doing so creates clutter and distracts from the content of your message.

• Be aware that many fonts and colors don’t translate across different email programs. Something that looks great on your screen may come through as a bunch of garbled characters on the recipient’s computer.

10. Don’t forward every forward you receive.

• Forwards can be fun, but many of them have been circulating on the internet for years, and many people hate getting them. If you want to pass along a particularly entertaining or astute forward, clean it up first. Remove all previous exchanges and recipients’ email addresses from the body of the email, and clean up extra characters (such as >>> or ---) to make the email easy to read.

11. Use the subject line wisely

• Be careful what you type in the subject line of your email. Too often, people will exchange emails back and forth and never remember to change the text in the subject line as they move on to other topics. This makes it very difficult when trying to locate a specific email later on. Always use the subject line for text that is relevant to the current email you are sending.

— Patti Malott