Thursday, July 21

Email Etiquette

Hello lovely people! Rischa is out for the day, so I, The Email Police, am filling in for her. Nice to meet you! Are you ready for a lesson in email etiquette? No? You'd rather just go around sharing your friends, family, clients, coworkers, and future enemies' email addresses with the world until they're on so many spammers' lists that they have to change their addresses and refuse to give YOU their new one because you're so important you can't take the time to learn and do it correctly? Okay, but don't blame me when you get that error email because your friend has blocked or bounced your emails. Muhahaha!!!

(Tape is from Pugly Pixel)

Have you ever received an email from someone where you have to scroll and scroll and scroll through hundreds of email addresses to find the actual content of the email? Yeah, it's annoying. Don't be one of those people! Clean up your emails before forwarding. It's easy....just highlight and delete everything except the intended content that made you think, "Oh yeah, I bet so and so would get something from this". 


Once the email has been properly cleaned, here's what you do next. Yes, more instructions. You're a big girl (or guy)....you can do this! Trust me! If I can do these things, so can you. After a little while you'll wonder why everyone doesn't do it because it's so simple. If you need to copy and paste my instructions into a personal note, please feel free to do so until you get the hang of things. 

First an image for the visual learners out there. Click this image to see it larger and read the instructions included inside the image. You may right click and save if it helps.

First, I want you to add a new contact to your email address book. I can't be too specific here because I don't know the instructions for EVERY email client out there. I use Apple's "Mail" email client. Do a quick Google search for "How to add contacts to -insert your email client here-" to find out how to add contacts if you don't know how.  In the "name" field you should type, "Undisclosed Recipients". In the "email address" field you should type in your own email address. Then, next time you send an email to more than one recipient you'll type in, "Undisclosed Recipient" in the "To" field. 


Next, you'll want to make sure your "BCC", or "Blind Carbon Copy" is visible in your email client. Once you set this option you won't have to go through this every time you send an email. Again, I can't (ok, I could, but I'm not doing ALL the work for you.) give specific instructions for every email client, so you'll want to do a Google search for "How to make BCC visible in -insert email client's name here-". Once you do this you'll start adding the multiple email addresses into this field each time you send an email to multiple recipients. 


I know it's sounding like a lot of instructions for a simple task at this point, but keep in mind that you won't have to set things up every time. You'll only have to set up the "Undisclosed Recipients" contact once and the same goes for making the BCC field visible in your email client.


Now that we've got that all straightened out, let's talk about a few other annoying or just, plain rude activities. 

1.  Signing others up for things at web sites. If you think I'd be interested in a web site, that's great. I appreciate you thinking of me. Thank you! (That's not sarcasm....no, really) However, please send me the link and tell me why I'd be interested. Signing me up for something by using my email address without my permission is rude. It's like giving out my phone number to random strangers. It also makes my email address vulnerable to those pesky spammers. 

2. If you send me an email with just a link I'm going to assume you've been hacked and the email has been sent by the hacker and the link will cause me all sorts of trouble. I don't click links in emails or on Facebook unless I know for a fact that it's legit. When I get an email and all it contains is a link it seems suspicious. If I receive an email with a link and a personal note from you, a person I know and trust, I'll open it. 


That's your lesson for today my super sexy blog readers. Thanks for stopping by and thanks to Julie Prichard for the nudge to write up this blog post.