Email Best Practices, keep it clean, keep it simple

Over time, and many thousands of emails after (yes, most of it spam), I have managed to make email every day a very simple task considering I receive around 30 to 35 emails a day I need to attend (because they are either a task I must complete or a situation that requires my attention).  I'll give you some simple quick tips that will make your email experience more enjoyable and will avoid you some heavy headaches in the future... yes, my pain is for your benefit.  Let's get down to it:

1. Choose a good unified email client: over time, people usually have more than one email address.  With so many free email providers now a days, plus your personal address, your work address and that new project you are working on email address you end up having to go to multiple sites or launching different emails programs (one at home and one at the office) and probably even in different platforms (PC at the office and mac at home).  When you unify all your email address either by forwarding them all to a unique account or configuring all the accounts on a single system (gmail supports this as an example and it is free), all your mail is in one place.  When looking for something you don't quite recall you only need to search in one place.  Most importantly, you check all your emails at the same time with a single click.
2. Properly identify yourself in your emails: I've seen a lot of people use generic email address or email addresses associated with multiple users not being correctly used.  If you send out emails as sales@yourcompany.com, you can still identify yourself, you can use something like "MY COMPANY SALES DEPARTMENT (Jose Lopez)" or similar to your choosing.  It helps your mail readers identify who sent the email without having to open the actual email.  I have an actual supporting case for this.  I had ordered some products from Mac and Microwarehouse some time ago and I had received several emails from one of their reps from a generic address.  I had to call them and they asked me who I had communicated previously with through email so that person could follow up with my case directly.  For some reason, every time I tried opening that email, Outlook would just crashed on me.  Had I seen the sender in the email Sender's information I wouldn't have to open the email to find out.
3. Use Folders, keep your inbox empty and flag your messages: There is no greater satisfaction when you work with emails than seeing you have completed all your tasks and you are done for the day.  I usually keep my mailbox crystal clean.  That way when something new arrives I can easily spot it and address it.  Whenever I address a certain email I simply archive it in its corresponding folder and remove it from my inbox.  When I have remaining or pending issues with an email I leave it in my Inbox, that way, every-time I open my mail I know what I have pending.  Two other methods of doing the same thing is flagging emails you will work on later or leaving them as unread.  However, since these two methods require you to select, and mark your emails with a proper action I rather just leave then in my inbox.  If i was in a hurry and had to close down quickly when I come back, they will be right there waiting for me.
4. Use BCC and CC properly: It is bad already to forward chain emails (I can't believe people still do this), on top of it, people don't seem to realize that this is the main source for spammers to acquire email addresses.  Most people just forward email to everyone in the TO or CC box, making all addresses available to whoever is receiving the information.  In addition, as the forward goes larger, all those email addresses are kept in the message, making them available to anyone with a text reader who can scan for email addresses and add them to a mailing database.  This is how we end up with spam in our mailboxes.  I advice not to send chain letters or forwards mainly but if you must, at least protect the privacy of those you send it to by adding them to your BCC instead of your TO or CC boxes.
5. Watch out for attachments: be careful when attaching images and documents to your emails.  You might have a good internet connection speed but your recipient might not.  People might feel I am exaggerating but I consider anything about 500 Kbs insanely huge for an email attachment.  There are many free services out there which can host your file for free, this way, all you need to do is include a link in your email and you avoided the attachment.  The attachment also takes considerable space on someone's mailbox as it is saved with the email you sent it with, hence taking valuable space out of someone's mailboxes.  Furthermore, with so many viruses going on through email currently, ISP's are implementing more rigorous security quite often, checking compressed files for viruses or suspicious file extensions and so on.  We have an actual case, we used to send out technical implementation docs as part as our customer service to customers who requested implementation information, these files include scripts in PHP, ASP, PERL, etc.  When we switched to including URLS to download the attachments instead of attaching them to the email we noticed we receive a larger conversion ratio to those setup emails.  Upon further investigation, we learned that many ISP's were blocking our emails because of the attachments we were including.  They were suspicious.
6. Always use plain text messaging and use HTML only when you really need it: I know stationaries or that cool signature you may use looks awesome, but your email is not suppose to impress by its looks, it should impress by its content.  Many people choose to read emails in plain text to keep things simpler.  Many still are forced to read plain text emails because of the device they are reading their email in.  Furthermore, many and I mean many HTML emails are badly coded and they show up differently in multiple email clients.  Additionally, when you use HTML to code your email, while the content of your email is the same size as if it was plain text, the resulting email file size is bigger because of all the HTML code in the background.
7. Title your emails and Sign them: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS use an adequate title for your email.  Something you can easily associate with the contents of the conversation as it progress.  I still get many emails with no subjects.  When you include a friendly subject you and your reader can easily associate the contents to the email to the given title.  This makes it so much easier when you are looking for that piece of information from a year back and you just don't recall.  As soon as you see the title, you identify that is the mail you are looking for.  Also, using a signature makes your email appear more professional and it may also serve a marketing purpose.  You can feature your latest blog entries or your latest review websites.
8. Keep your Spam folder clean and check it often: Spam becomes a burden because we let it.  If you keep your spam box clean, whenever you get new spam you have few items to check and see if they are indeed spam.  Many website registration entries or follow up emails end up in your spam box because of the way they send the email.  Of course ideally they should avoid sending them wrong not to be marked as spam but assuming you are the consumer and you do not want to miss out on valuable information you should try to keep your spam box as clean as possible so you can easily identify when something is incorrectly marked as spam and take the necessary measurements.
9. Watch out for phishing: Email Phishing happens when someone sends you an email that appears to be from someone is not and asks you to take a given action to steal your account or important information from you.  This is how people end up with your bank account access information and steal your money.  This is also how people hack into paypal accounts, ebay, etc.  If you pay close attention to the emails asking you to take action you will notice that usually the address is somewhat weird and not the address you know.  The best practice to avoid falling in the wrong hands is to go to the address yourself, manually, instead of clicking on the provided link.  This way you know exactly where you are logging in.

These are a few simple guidelines I recommend.  I hope you enjoyed it and find it useful.

Jose R. Lopez

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