Respect the Privacy of Others. Assume that You Have None.

One of the professional organizations I belong to sponsors several incredibly helpful listserves where members can send messages to everyone who has signed up and ask questions they need help with, offer technical expertise, request a reference for a particular product or vendor or air whatever else they have on their mind. It’s a great resource and a wonderful example of how people from across the country and around the world can come together to as an online community. Unfortunately, online communities aren’t immune to the same kinds of problems that we see in other groups. Though these listserves specifically exclude vendors from joining and members are frequently reminded that all that all conversations are confidential and should not be shared with anyone else without permission, every so often it seems that we have to go through a blowup when it becomes clear that the vendors have been keeping up with our discussions.

It happens like this; I send out a message asking if anyone has been having trouble with the XYZ Corporation’s doohickeys and mention that I haven’t had much luck with their customer support, either. Lo and behold, I almost immediately get a call from my XYZ representative, who I haven’t heard from in years but insists the call is purely part of their normal program of keeping in touch with clients. I call the listserve administrator, who assures me that there are no vendors on the group list, so one of my fellow members had to have forwarded my message along. Maybe they thought they were doing me a favor. Maybe they have a close relationship with someone at XYZ Corp. But this is exactly the kind of thing that you should never do without permission and why you need to assume that your email exchanges are never private. A big part of the problem is that you may have a very different idea of what information is appropriate to share than the original sender of the message. And you might not even have enough information to know what’s appropriate to forward along and what’s not. I’ve been surprised more than once to find that people I really like are close friends with people I can barely tolerate and been immensely relieved that I haven’t bad-mouthed one to the other. Imagine if you’ve put those feelings down in writing….

The wise thing to do is to always ask permission before forwarding along someone else’s message. If you can’t ask for permission, delete anything that the third party doesn’t need to see from the original message, even if you think it’s innocuous. That’s right, you can edit someone else’s message and forward it along—which is another reason to be wary of email. Because you can’t rely on stopping these sorts of leaks, don’t put anything in email you don’t want other people to see, whether it’s racy vacation pictures, financial information or criticism of someone else. You need to assume that someone may violate your trust and privacy, whether they intend to or just don’t know any better.

Be Aware of Your Employer’s Email Policy

Remember that towering stack of papers you pretended to read and then signed? No, not the ones you signed without reading when you bought your house—the stack of papers you signed without reading when you started your job. Somewhere in there was information about your health insurance (or lack of it), something affirming your citizenship status and probably an acknowledgment of how as an at-will employee you could be fired at any time for any reason—or for no reason at all. If you signed all of that paperwork in the last five or ten years chances are that one of the pieces of paper you ignored was your company’s email policy. Now might be a good time to go back and read that. Even if you have no idea what you did with all of those orientation papers you can probably find the policy on your company’s intranet site. If worse comes to worse, ask your HR person for a copy—though they might wonder what you’re up to.

Odds are your policy says something close to what mine says. No one likes to write these kinds of things from scratch and companies tend to borrow liberally from each other. It's likely that your firm’s policy says something along the lines that all your email is the property of your firm and that while some personal use is permitted it is expected that it will be kept to a minimum. It probably also says that everything in your email is subject to review by the company. There’s no room here to claim that your email is private; unlike in the UK, where personal privacy rules are much more stringent, there are no laws in the US protecting the privacy of email (or voicemail, for that matter) in the workplace.

If you really must have private email conversations at work or need to provide an email address for personal transactions like banking or shopping it’s an excellent idea to set up an email account through one of the free services like Hotmail or Gmail. Although some companies block these sites to prevent viruses from sneaking into their systems, many will allow you to use them. That way you have a place to keep your personal messages that you can access when you need to but is out of the hands of your employer. In all likelihood, your firm doesn’t want your personal mail anyway. Since it can ultimately be held responsible for any mail on its system, your company can—at least theoretically—be sued if you use your email to stalk a co-worker or bilk Nigerians out of their life savings.

Realistically, you’re going to use your work email to make dinner plans and receive confirmations from your travel agent. But use a personal email account for anything that’s less than innocuous.

Don’t Depend on Recalling Messages

“Recall” is one of those features that I’m really inclined to say that you should never use. But “never” is an awfully tough rule to live with and people tend to resist when you tell them they should “never” do anything. So rather than have you throw on your old black leather jacket and start recalling messages just to prove that you’re an email rebel, I’ll suggest that you avoid using recall as much as you possibly can. I’m sure that your email administrator would tell you that it’s a feature that you shouldn’t use—she’d probably turn it off altogether if it were up to her—because of the havoc it can wreak on your mail server. Trying to recall a message from a large number of recipients can slow, or even crash, an entire email system. While it’s amazingly easy to accidentally forward an inappropriate joke to everyone in your office (all you have to do is pick the wrong distribution list), it’s much more difficult for your email system to go back once the message has been sent, search through all of the mailboxes and messages they contain and retrieve all of the copies of the one you wish you had never sent.

I’d tell you not to use “recall” for another reason. It usually doesn’t work. What do you do first when you receive one of those messages saying “so-and-so would like to recall the message: My boss is a big fat jerk”? You think to yourself, “well this must be something interesting” and you open and read it, don’t you? That’s what everyone does. Attempting to retrieve a message usually just draws attention to it, which causes your recipients to open it and makes the email impossible to recall any longer. Even if your correspondents aren’t sitting at their desks waiting to thwart your recall attempts, chances are you still won’t be successful. If you’re sending to someone outside of your own email system the other one may not be compatible with recall or may have the feature turned off. Even more of a concern these days is the preponderance of BlackBerrys and other mobile devices in the workplace. Once a message has been received on one of these they can’t be recalled—though attempting to do so will generate one of those attention-grabbing emails pointing out that you’ve attempted to recall the message. Good luck with that.

Avoid Using HTML Stationary, Graphics, Excessive Color and Odd Fonts

The pile of bad resumes that I’ve received over the years has been far more valuable than I ever imagined. It turns out that there are many lessons to be learned about bad writing from the mistakes people make with their resumes. In addition to my encounters with the boastful guy (“I was their best trainer ever!”), the inappropriately-familiar-for-a-stranger guy (“Hey Corby!), the woman who included a Glamour Shots portrait of herself and the people who are hopelessly unable to proofread (almost everyone), I’ve run across the woman who prints her resume on lavender paper with gold flecks. While that might be appropriate for something (wizarding school applications?), it sure isn’t going to help you find a job with me.

Unfortunately, it’s way too easy to make the same mistake in email. Outlook and other email programs provide you with their own forms of “stationary” that too often includes busy backgrounds and brightly colored fonts that make it hard or impossible for your readers to make out what you’re trying to say. Even worse, although it often seems that Microsoft’s domination of the office software market must be nearly complete by now, there are still lots of people out there using other emails programs who won’t be able to open your message at all if you send it to them on the cute stationary with the kittens frolicking around the borders that you downloaded from spyware.com. Many web-based email programs and handheld devices simply won’t be able to deal with the kind of message. Some won’t get through because they’ll be blocked as suspicious attachments. Others will arrive with your text, the background and any other graphics all as separate attachments that your readers will have to open one at a time in order to find what you have to say. Since many of your readers are worried about the security threats posed by opening unknown attachments they just won’t do it. And a few of them will be so confused by a blank message with a whole bunch of strangely-named attachments that they just won’t click on them. In the end it’s just not worth the trouble of using the cute kitties and risking that your message won’t be read, even if you don’t take into account the impact that the less-than-professional look of your message might have on your readers. It’s never a good idea to make them work harder than necessary.
And don’t even get me started on what the dog people will think about those kittens….

Some other formatting issues to consider:

Avoid pictures and clipart for the same reasons you should avoid email stationary. Not everyone will appreciate them and they can balloon the file size of your messages, filling up inboxes and taking a long time to download over remote access or on handheld devices. If you just can’t live without them, save images in a lower resolution to reduce the file size.

Make a habit of using the most common fonts in all of your messages. It’s really best to stick to the basics when writing business email despite the temptation many people feel to personalize their work. Some fonts and colors can be difficult to read, especially when light colored text is used against a white background. To be safe, use a sans-serif font like Arial and choose black text on a white background. Ten or twelve point text is also best so your text isn’t too small that it can’t be read or so big that it looks like you’re shouting at your readers.

I know, it’s a little boring, but writing business email really isn’t an exercise in creativity. Your goal is to make sure that people hear what you have to say.

Read the Whole Message Before Responding

This issue is the flip side of something I wrote about earlier when I suggested that you Keep to One Subject Per Email. The point that I made there is that many recipients just don’t take the time to carefully read all of a message before they hit “reply” and start writing their response to you. They’re in such a hurry to get another message out of their inbox that they answer one of your questions but don’t notice that there is a second one. Or they assume that they get the gist of your message from reading the first sentence or two and ask you a cranky question that’s answered in your third.

Just as it’s your responsibility as a writer to construct clear and efficient messages, it’s also your responsibility as a reader to read the entire text of an email and make sure you understand it as best you can instead of firing off a response that’s based on a cursory reading of the first few words. It’s important to remember that while you and I might be trying to be good citizens of the email ecosystem, limiting ourselves to one topic per message and putting the most important information at the beginning of our email, not everyone else is as thoughtful or has our good training. You may work with someone, even your boss, who still subscribes to the “murder mystery” school of writing and likes to save all of the most important stuff for the last line of her messages. Ta-Dah! Help her—and help yourself—by making sure that you understand everything she has to say as well as you can before making a decision or responding. You’re never going to understand everything perfectly (bad writing creates all kinds of mysteries and confusion), but it’s worth the effort. Why bother? As usual, because you don’t want to look stupid—and being a bad reader can make you look stupid just as easily as being a bad writer.

Let Recipients Know the Nature of Attachments

Even though most of our workplaces now outfit our computers with spam and virus blockers that do a pretty good job of protecting us from all of the nasty junk bouncing around out there on the internet, malicious emails still manage to slip through every now and then. So if you want your message to get through to your recipients and you want your readers to be confident enough to open and read it make sure to give them a clear idea of what they’ll find inside. A quick description (“Here’s an Excel spreadsheet with the May sales figures”) will assure them that the file is actually from you and let them know what program they need in order to open it. I’ve even seen some people include links that their recipients can use to download free programs like Adobe Acrobat when the files are in a format such as PDF. What a thoughtful gesture!

On the other hand, an attachment that comes with a generic description or no explanation at all may be ignored by your correspondents or automatically relegated to a spam folder where it will be hard to find and recognize as a legitimate file. Because spammers and virus writers have become very good at “spoofing” or faking email addresses, it’s not enough that your message says that it’s from you. I find emails in my spam filter all of the time that look just as though I’d sent them to myself despite the fact that they’re hawking Viagra knock-offs (Viagrow, anyone?) or trying to get me to adopt bulldog puppies from Africa. In order to overcome the uncertainty this creates you need to make your readers confident that your message is from you and that your attachment is safe to open.

Of course some people take caution too far and wind up living in fear of opening every email or clicking on every link on the web. You don’t want to become one of them, terrified that every interaction you have with your computer is potentially sending your credit report to Buglarian mobsters or will cause your PC to start smoking and melt into a pile of plastic and circuit boards. People who are scared of or intimidated by their computers rarely learn to make efficient use of them. Just the same, you don’t want to go around opening things will-nilly. Emails about certain topics-- Anna Kournikova, Viagra, the entire country of Nigeria-- should set off alarm bells in your head and be treated like the potential landmines they are. Unless you’re involved with professional tennis, work in the pharmaceutical industry or are expecting a big inheritance from Nigeria, messages related to those topics should probably be deleted ASAP.

Attach a Word Document Rather than Compose a Lengthy Message in Email

While email is great for many things, it isn’t really well suited for the composition of lengthy messages.  Unlike Word (or any other modern word processing program) email isn’t designed to automatically wrap text to the next line and keep each of them a readable length.  Instead it just keeps going until it reaches the right end of your screen, the window you have open, or until you hit “enter” and start a new paragraph.  As more and more of us work on larger and larger monitors this means that lines of text get longer and harder to follow.  Because of this-- and because you can never be sure what email client people are using to read your message-- there’s really no way to know what the message is going to look like when it reaches the other end.  Depending on whether your readers are set up to receive mail in HTML, Rich Text or plain ol’ Plain Text, all of your fancy formatting and the images you’ve included might not even show up.

Do your readers a favor and compose long messages with lots of text and formatting in your word processor and attach them to your email.  Not only will they be easier to read but you can make use of the far superior tools included with the word processor to refine your document and make it more accurate and attractive.  You’ll also save yourself some of the heartache that comes when you’ve been working on a long email, the program crashes and you lose all your work.  I can’t tell you how many attorneys I’ve worked with who have lost hours of work this way and expect to be able to retrieve text that’s now long gone.  Word processors do a far superior job of automatically saving documents as you work and recovering them when you crash—though you should still make the effort to hit that “save” button occasionally. 

I know, it’s a lot of effort.