3.2: Sending Emails

Just as with physical (paper) mail, the first thing you see when an email arrives in your inbox is the identity of the sender. The address determines immediately how you feel about that email—excited, uninterested, curious, angry, hopeful, scared, or just obliged to read it. Your email address will create similar impressions on those you email depending on your relationship to them. It’s therefore important that you send from the right email address.

If you work for a company, obviously you must use your company email address for company business. Customers expect it. Bear in mind that in a legal and right-to-privacy sense, you don’t own these emails. This means that you must be careful not to write anything in an email that could compromise your employability.

If you are writing on your own behalf for any business or job-application purposes, it’s vital that you have a respectable-looking email address. Using a college or university email is a good idea because it proves that you indeed are attending or attended a post-secondary institution when you’ve made that claim in your application. If your school email address has expired, however, it’s worth starting an account that has a straightforward address showing your name. If your name is Kay Fogarty, for instance, your ideal email address would simply be kayfogarty@ with one of the major email providers like Gmail or Outlook/Hotmail. Of course, everybody knows that all of the straightforward firstname.lastname@ addresses have been taken, so there’s nothing wrong with variations that include middle names or initials and small numbers as long as they don’t get too big, such as more than 25 characters.

You will likely need to hold multiple email accounts—one for work, one for school, and one for personal matters. Each of the 3.8 billion email users in the world has an average of 1.7 email accounts (Radicati, 2017). It’s likely that you will have more than three throughout your life and retire accounts as you move on from school and various workplaces. If you can manage it, you can set up forwarding so that you can run multiple accounts out of one, except where company or institutional policy requires that you work entirely within a designated email provider or client.

The timestamp that comes with each email means that responsiveness matters and raises the question of what the expectations are for acceptable lag time between you receiving an email and returning an expected response. Of course, you can reply as soon as possible as you would when texting and have a back-and-forth recorded in a thread. What if you need more time, however?

Though common wisdom used to be that the business standard is to reply within 24 hours, the availability of email on the smartphones that almost everyone carries in their pockets has reduced that expectation to a few hours. Recent research shows that half of email responses in business environments in fact comes within two hours (Vanderkam, 2016). Some businesses have internal policies that demand even quicker responses because business moves fast. If you can get someone’s business sooner than the competition because you reply sooner, then of course you’re going to make every effort to reply right away.

What if you can’t reply within the expected number of hours? The courteous course of action is to reply as soon as possible with a brief message saying that you’ll be turning your attention to this matter as soon as you can. You don’t have to go into detail about what’s delaying you unless it’s relevant to the topic at hand, but courtesy requires that you at least give a timeline for a fuller response and stick to it.

The next most important piece of information you see when scanning your inbox is the email’s subject line. Busy professionals who receive dozens of emails each day prioritize their workload and response efforts based largely on the content of the subject lines appearing in their inboxes. Because it acts as a title for the email, the subject line should accurately summarize its topic in 3-7 words. (This is the ideal length, but never sacrifice clarity to make the subject line short.)

The word count range here is important because your subject line shouldn’t be so vague that it is misleading, nor so long and detailed that it will be cut off by your inbox layout. Most details about specific times and places, for instance, should really be in the message itself rather than in the subject line (see Table 3.2.B below). Also, avoid using words in your subject line that might make your email look like spam. A subject line such as Hello or Interesting offer might appear to be a hook to get you to open an email that contains a malware virus. This may prompt the recipient to delete it to be on the safe side, or their email provider may automatically send it to the junkmail box, which people rarely check.

Table 3.2.B: Subject Line Length

Whatever you do, don’t leave your subject line blank! Even if you’re just sending a quick email with an attachment to yourself and do not include other content in the message, the subject line text will be essential to your ability to retrieve that file later. You might find yourself desperately needing that file months or even years later because the laptop it was saved on was stolen or damaged beyond repair, which you couldn’t have predicted at the time you sent it. A search in your email provider for words matching those you used in the subject line will quickly help you find the email in question. Without words in the subject line or message, however, you’ll have no choice but to guess at when you sent the email and waste time going through page after page of sent-folder messages looking for it. A few seconds spent writing a good subject line can save you hours of frustrating searches later.

The opening salutation of an email indicates the name of the receiver but also reveals the level of formality of the email in question. As you can see in Table 3.2.C, opening with Dear [Full Name] or Greetings, [Full Name]: strikes an appropriately respectful tone when writing to someone for the first time in a professional context. When greeting someone you’ve emailed before, Hello, [First name]: maintains a semiformal tone. When you’re more casually addressing a familiar colleague, a simple Hi [First name], is just fine.

Table 3.2.C: Opening Salutation Examples

Notice that the punctuation includes a comma after the greeting word and a colon after their name for formal and semiformal occasions following. Informal greetings, however, relax these rules by omitting the comma after the greeting word and replacing the colon with a comma.

Depending on the nature of the message, you can use alternative greeting possibilities. If you’re thanking someone for information they’ve sent you, you can do so right away in the greeting; e.g., Many thanks for the contact list, Maggie. When your email exchange turns into a back-and-forth thread involving several emails, it’s customary to drop the salutation altogether and treat each message as if it were a text message even in formal situations.

Formality also dictates whether you use the recipient’s first name or full name in your salutation. If you’re writing to someone you know well or responding to an email where the sender signed off at the bottom using their first name, that means you may address the sender by the first name in your response. If you’re addressing someone formally for the first time, however, you may want to strike an appropriately respectful tone by using the receiver’s full name. If you’re addressing a group, a simple Hello, all: or Hello, team: will do.

Be careful when selecting recipients, however. First, spell their name correctly because email addresses often have non-standard combinations of name fragments and numbers; any typos will result in the server bouncing your email back to you as being unsent. Waiting before entering their name in the recipient or “To” field is also wise in case you accidentally hit the Send button before you finish drafting your email. If you prematurely send an email, a quick follow-up apologizing for the confusion and the completed message is the best damage control you can do, but it requires immediate action. Another preventative measure is to compose a message offline, then copy and paste it into the email field when you’re ready to send.

If you have a primary recipient in mind but want others to see the message, you can include them in the CC (carbon copy) line. If confidentiality requires that recipients shouldn’t see one another’s addresses, BCC [blind carbon copy] them instead. Be selective with whom you CC, however. It’s good to keep your manager in the loop, of course, but you may want to do this only at the beginning and the end of a project’s many email exchanges. Your manager will appreciate that things are under way and wrapping up but may get annoyed to receive a copy of every little mundane back-and-forth throughout the process. If in doubt, speak with your manager about their preferences.

Never “reply all” so that everyone included in the “To” and “CC” lines can see your reply unless your response includes information that everyone absolutely must see. If your manager sends some information to all 80 people in your department, for instance, your reply-all response that just acknowledges receipt with an “OK, thanks!” —which is unnecessary in the first place —will anger 79 people who expected to see valuable information. If the first email was about a departmental meeting time though the location was yet to be determined, but you now have that information because you did the booking, of course you would reply all to provide that necessary follow-up.

No matter whom you select as the primary or secondary (CC) recipients of your email, always assume that your email may be forwarded on to other people, including some people you might not have wanted to show it to. Just because you’ve selected recipients doesn’t necessarily make your email a private channel. You have no control over whether the recipients forward it to others, what the server administrators do with it (legally or not), or if your account or the server is hacked. If your email contains any legally sensitive content, it can even be retrieved from the server storing it with a warrant from law enforcement. A good rule to follow is to never send an email that you would be embarrassed by if it were read by your boss, your family, or a jury. No technical barriers can truly prevent it from falling into their hands.

A courteous closing to an email involves a combination of a pleasant sign-off word or phrase and your first name. As with the opening salutation, closing salutation possibilities depend on the nature of the message and where you want to position it on the formality spectrum, as shown in Table 3.2.D.

Table 3.2.D: Closing Salutation Examples

Your first email to someone in a professional context should end with a more formal closing salutation. Later emails to the same person can use the appropriate semiformal closing salutation for the occasion. If you’re on friendly, familiar terms with the person but still want to include email formalities, an informal closing salutation can work as a confirmation of that friendly rapport.

Including your first name after the closing salutation ends in a friendly way shows your recipients that they can address you by your first name in their reply. In your physical absence, your name at the end is also a stamp of authorship. Omitting it gives the impression of being abrupt and/or too busy to conclude the message appropriately.

Not to be confused with an electronic version of your handwritten signature, the e-signature that automatically appears at the very bottom of your email is like the business card you would hand to someone when networking. Every professional should have one. Like a business card, the e-signature includes all relevant contact information. At the very least, the e-signature should include the details given in Table 3.2.E.

Table 3.2.E: E-Signature Parts

Depending on the individual’s situation, variations on the e-signature include putting your educational credentials after your name (e.g., MBA) on the same line and professional role on the second line, especially if it’s a long one, and the company address on one line or two. Also, those working for a company usually include the company logo to the left of their e-signature. Other professionals add links to their social media profiles such as LinkedIn and the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

Email’s ability to help you send and receive documents makes it an indispensable tool for any business. Here are a few suggestions for managing attachments:

• Always announce an attachment in an email message with a very brief description of its contents. For instance, “Please find attached the minutes from today’s departmental meeting” might be all you write between the opening and closing salutations.
• Never leave a message blank when attaching a document in an email to someone else. Your message should at least be like the one given above.
• Ensure that your attachment size, if it’s many megabytes (MB), is still less than your email provider’s maximum allowable for sending and receiving.
• Always check to ensure that you’ve attached a document as part of your editing process. It shows that you lack attention to detail if your recipient responds to remind you to attach the document.

Before hitting the Send button, follow through on the entire writing and editing process by using revision, editing, and proofreading. Put yourself in your reader’s position and assess whether you’ve achieved the purpose you set out to achieve. Evaluate if you’ve struck the appropriate tone and formality.

After revising the message, always proofread it. In any professional situation, but especially in important ones related to gaining and keeping employment, any typo or error related to spelling, grammar, or punctuation can cost you dearly.

Table 3.2.F: A Poorly Written & Improved Email

Table 3.2.F illustrates the difference between an unclear draft and a revised email. The poorly written draft has the look of a hastily and angrily written text to a “frenemy.” An email to a superior, however, calls for a much more formal, tactful, courteous, and apologetic approach. The undifferentiated wall of text that omits or botches standard email parts such as opening and closing salutations is the first sign of trouble. The lack of capitalization, poor spelling, run-on sentences and lack of other punctuation such as apostrophes for contractions, as well as the inappropriate personal details, all suggest that the writer doesn’t take their studies seriously enough to deserve any favours. Besides tacking on a question at the end, one that could be easily answered by reading the syllabus, the writer is ultimately unclear about the purpose of the email. If the writer wants an explanation for the failing grade, that should be stated upfront. The rudeness of the closing is more likely to enrage the recipient than to ensure a quick and detailed response.

The improved version stands a much better chance of the desired response. It corrects the problems of the first draft, starting with properly framing the message with expected formal email parts. It benefits from a more courteous tone in a message that front-loads a clear and polite request for information in the opening. The supporting detail in the message body and apologetic closing suggest that the student is well aware of how to communicate like a professional to achieve a particular goal.