Tips on using Email effectively

6.1. CAPITALS

Never type all in CAPITALS. It's the hallmark of the beginner, or the person who has left the CapsLock key pressed. On the Internet, all-caps messages are regarded as the equivalent of SHOUTING, and considered very rude.

Because many Spam messages have subjects typed all in capitals, some spam filters automatically trash them, so some people won't see your message anyway.

6.2. Answer the question

If someone sends you email asking you a question, it's because they want an answer. Read carefully what they wrote, and answer the question they asked, not some imaginary question which you prefer to answer, but which they didn't ask.

6.3. Don't blather

Use plain language and avoid complex phrasing and long sentences. This is especially important if you do not know the educational level or language competency of your recipients. Steer clear of literary devices like sarcasm, irony, metaphor, oxymoron, etc; and of cultural references which non-native-speakers of your language may not understand.

⇛ Avoid wording belonging to the distant past, unless you're trying deliberately to appear quaint or archaic, especially those quill-pen Victorian business-correspondence phrases beloved of the semi-literate, like ‘please revert’ (if you want someone to reply, say ‘please reply’).

6.4. Out-of-office messages

Most email systems allow you to set an automated message to be sent while you are on holiday or away on business, known as ‘out-of-office’ or ‘vacation’ messages. While these can be useful, they can also be very dangerous:

• They can be used by spammers to confirm the existence of an address as genuine.

• They can cause ‘bouncing’ of messages on poorly-maintained mailing lists.

• Their repeated sending (in reply to every message that arrives) is a perpetual source of annoyance to other users.

For these reasons, the UCC email system does not send ‘out-of-office’ messages off-site: they only get sent to internal (UCC) addresses.

6.5. Recalling a message

This is a feature of Microsoft Outlook available only in the desktop edition. It is not available in OWA (Outlook Web Access).

In principle, it lets you recall a message sent locally, so that if the recipient has not yet seen it, it will be removed, and they won't know it was ever sent.

However, it only works in-house: it does not work outside your organisation’s Exchange domain or O365 (Office 365) tenancy, so using it for email that has been sent outside your institution will fail — all that will happen is that your recipient will see both the original message and your attempt to recall it.

The moral of the story is to be more careful about what you write and to whom you send it. But accidents will happen — see section 1.6, ‘What to do when you go wrong’.