billso.com

I’ve said it before in 2004 and 2006: email is broken. It’s a great rant topic for my 1200th blog post.

The credibility of email as a marketing medium was destroyed years ago by UCE (unsolicited commercial email or spam). Managers helped destroy email as a business tool shortly afterwards.

Students often treat email as a casual messaging tool, when college is a great opportunity to learn how to use email in an effective and professional manner. Every email user can learn to write better messages.

Help me read your email

It really helps me if the subject fields are meaningful. I get hundreds of email messages every day.

Tell me what class you’re taking. I don’t carry my class roster with me 24/7. I’ve had students email me questions about their assignment without ever mentioning which course they are taking. It’s more of a problem at the start of the term. After the first 2 or 3 weeks, I’ll remember which students are in which course.

Do you need an answer to a question? Then summarize the question in the subject line. If it’s an easy question, I can send a quick reply with my answer. If an answer will take me more time, I’ll send a reply saying so.

Are you asking me to do something for you on a deadline? Put the date in the subject line.

No fancy email

Email is a great tool for written communication, as long as the message is written in plaintext. When I get HTML-formatted email that has pretty backgrounds and fancy fonts - assuming that the message made it past my servers’ spam blockers - my reply is almost always in plaintext.

HTML is for web pages, not mail messages. The writer’s color choices might look nice to them, but these colors might render the email unreadable to a color-blind recipient.

It’s far too easy to hide web bugs and bogus code in an HTML-formatted email message. Some mobile email clients like Gmail will strip the HTML formatting before displaying the message.

I hate “reply all”

I often receive email messages from other faculty members, and the cc: and to: fields are littered with addresses. I love my colleagues, but some of them never really learned how to use the Internet or email.

Some email servers block messages with large numbers of outbound email addresses, as a courtesy to the potential recipients. If one of the recipients presses the “reply all” button, their message gets sent to the entire list. It gets annoying when their reply is something innocuous like “OK” or “I’ll be there”.

Get with the program

Most people who are sending one email message to more than 20 people should consider posting the content to a web page, an intranet, or an RSS feed.

Granted, I do use the mass email function in TurnItIn.com to remind students about assignment deadlines, or to announce a new assignment. I almost always make these announcements on billso.com, but experience has taught me that some students cannot access the web site on a regular basis.

I’m could go off on a rant, but most of my students do use email effectively. These articles from about.com and Microsoft have some great tips for those who are interested.