E-mail has become a major means of communication for most of us. For e-mail usage to be productive and meaningful, we need to adhere to some etiquette. Below is my compilation of some e-mail best practices.

Response Time
It is professional courtesy to acknowledge receipt of emails in a timely manner. Always try to reply within 24 hours. If unable to reply within 48 hours, do send a short note like “looking into the matter and will get back to you soon” to inform the sender that the email was received and noted.

Subject Line
Subject Line should be unique and meaningful. Let the recipient know at first glance what this email is about.

E-mail Topic
Only discuss one topic per email. This way emails can be filed properly.

CC (Carbon Copy) and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy)
Use CC to courteously show with confidence who you have copied the e-mail to. Use BCC to prevent everybody from seeing everybody else’s e-mail address when e-mailing to a group.

Chain Letters
You may enjoy chain letters, but people are busy and do not have the time to participate in such schemes.

Virus warnings
Verify with reputable antivirus websites before sending out virus warnings. Although people appreciate real virus warnings, they do not appreciate hoaxes.

Virus Protection
Please have some form of antivirus on your computer. You will be the partner in crime if your computer or e-mail program is being used for criminal activities.

Email Signature
Include your contact information with website and phone numbers in your signature. Most people are using mobile devices to check e-mails these days, so do not include unnecessary graphics to clutter up the small screen. Graphics signatures were cool in the past, but as the Internet matures, simplicity is the best practice.

Forwarding
Forward only appropriate text; so clean up and remove anything that isn’t necessary.

White List
To avoid legitimate e-mails from going to the spam folder, always whitelist addresses you would receive e-mails from.

E-mail Subscription
Record your e-mail subscriptions to better manage them.
When you report spam on emails received from your subscriptions, you are sabotaging the sender’s sending reputation, which in time will cause the sender’s email delivery rate to go down.

I prefer IMAP over POP. Before we take a look at the differences between POP and IMAP, I would like to define “email client” as a mobile device app or computer/laptop program used to read and write emails.

POP – Post Office Protocol. This is a one-way flow of emails. Typically, an email client will retrieve emails from the email server to your local device or computer. These emails will stay at the device or computer locally. The remote email server will then delete the original emails. Although POP also allows other advanced configurations, for the purpose of this article, we shall not discuss them. This method is commonly used when the Internet speed is slower and is not always on.

Some people prefer using their computer to retrieve emails via POP. This method, if configured correctly, will allow emails received to stay at both the local computer and remote email server. When there is no Internet connection, emails can be read locally, especially older emails.

IMAP – Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP allows two-way email synchronization. When you set up your devices or computers to retrieve emails using the IMAP protocol you are effectively syncing all emails on the remote server to local devices or PCs. With this method, emails are centrally stored on the email server all the time, including sent emails. The more recent emails are also stored locally enabling access to them even if there is no Internet connection. This is the preferred method if you access emails from many devices/computers.

Since I use a phone, tablet, notebook and desktop to access emails, I prefer the IMAP method. This method allows me to be able to access all emails including sent emails using any device/computer. The disadvantage of this method is that you need to have Internet connection to read older emails that are not stored locally.