7 things to avoid while sending emails

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Can you imagine? In the year 2012, the total email traffic per day worldwide was 144 billion and the number of email users worldwide stood at 2.2, as reported by Pingdom.

With such huge email traffic worldwide, it’s for sure that the person you are emailing must be getting a lot of emails. If you want your emails to be read by the recipient and in order to make them effective you need to avoid the below silly mistakes.

Do you like others shouting at you? Obviously not. Make sure that you never write emails in capital letters. The receiver will feel that you are BARKING LIKE A HOUND – if it’s in all capitals.

Use the cc (carbon copy) and bcc (blind carbon copy) options sparingly. Mark a copy only if you want a specific action from the person or simply want to inform him/her by keeping in loop. Use bcc only when you want to send the same information to multiple receivers and you don’t want them to know who the other recipients are. 

Try to avoid using the ‘high priority/urgent’ options. It seems you are being bossy. Likewise, don’t request delivery receipts – the receiver is irritated with such mails. If it’s super urgent, simply state that in your mail. If you want to make sure that the receiver got your message just ask to confirm the receipt.

While replying, never push the reply all button without thinking. First, be sure whether all the receivers should be getting your reply or not. Simply replying all is filling the mailboxes of the recipients and wasting their time.

Don’t include the internal email discussions while forwarding the mail to an external contact. Don’t do that while forwarding to internal contacts as well. Use the message thread only when it is needed for the reference.

Don’t use flowery language and excessive compliments. You send emails to communicate, not to make the recipient turn the pages of a dictionary to look for the meaning. Compliment only if it’s necessary. Flatter too much and you will be taken as a bootlicker. 

Don’t use too large or too small fonts. Also avoid the flashy colours and fonts. Stick to easily readable fonts like Verdana and Arial. Don’t go above 11 points and below 9 points.