Andrew Tobias has come up with seven rules for e-mail that make excellent sense to me. I’ve excerpted them here; click the link and read the whole thing if you’re curious.
1. If your entire message can fit on the subject line, put it on the subject line – followed by EOM (end of message). Nothing more.
2. Make the subject line descriptive. If you make it: SUBJ: check this out and it turns out to be yet another copy of Bush’s resume (“I was arrested twice for drunk driving . . .”) that we’ve all seen 50 times by now, it is annoying. But if you make it: SUBJ: Bush’s resume, then we can smile faintly and delete it in three-tenths of a second.
3. If your message is to one person, begin the subject line with that person’s first name.
4. If you’re sending to a large group, use “blind copies” (unless there’s an awfully good reason to have everyone see the e-addresses of all 215 recipients).
5. If you’re responding to a group e-mail, hit REPLY rather than REPLY ALL unless you really think the whole group wants to see your reply. (Ah, the boorish irony of those who REPLY ALL with the message, “I do not appreciate your cluttering my inbox – please take me off your list.”)
6. If you’re attaching a letter or a newsclip, also cut and paste it into the body of the e-mail to spare the recipient’s having to open the attachment.
7. Place post scripts before your sign off, for reasons amply elucidated in the only really important column I have ever posted in this space.
I’m not so sure about #3. I get a lot of spam that tries to fool me into opening the message by using my name on the Subject line. But otherwise, this is good advice. And as Andy notes, if he can come with three more he’ll have a set of Commandments suitable for burning onto stone tablets.
For those who don’t know Andrew Tobias, he is an expert on money management (I first learned of him by using Andrew Tobias’ Managing Your Money back in the good old MS-DOS days, before Quicken, before Windows, before even color monitors). Andy is the author of some superb books and he’s also Treasurer of the Democratic Party. He was blogging at Andrewtobias.com years ago, before the word blog had even been coined.
Check it out. This site is a daily must-read for me.
Ed Bott 