Corporate Email Etiquette

[Aranda_Bay]

Share with us your corporate email best practices and nightmares.

This is to enlighten some corporate animals who do not seem to understand that the saying "If You Send It From the Office, It Comes From The Office" and love forwarding religious, inspirational, political and sometimes pornographic chain mail from their corporate emails.

Peeves:

- forwarded chain mail especially without a personal notation.
- email with huge multimedia attachments >1MB
- people who do not respond to serious email inquiries/notifications.
- email written in text speech (even if its an informal email)
- "reply to all" responses. Reply is addressed to one person but everyone receives it.
- email invitations to join Friendster, MySpace, Photobucket, Tickle etc...from a corporate email.

Nightmare:

- sent an email in anger without double checking.
- sent email to wrong recepient (most email servers have an automatic populating email address. So you emails intended for Steve are sent to Stephen.)

[KuyaDanny]

I would like to add:

1) When you reply, and if you must forward, strip the quoted/forwarded material of all unneccessary information (old headers, old signatures, etc). These make the messages you send unnecessarily long and difficult to read.

2) Know the difference between CC: (carbon copy) and BCC: (blind carbon copy). If your email add is not listed in the CC:, then it is a BCC: which means the sender does not wish the recipient to know that a copy is being sent to you.

When you receive a BCC: email, you are expected only to read it and keep quiet. Either that, or to reply to the sender only. Do not communicate to the recipient. You might cause the parties unwanted embarrassment.