Email Etiquette – When Harry Met Sally

Most (but not all) of us now know that it’s not a good idea, when emailing lots of people, to put all of their addresses in the To or CC field.

Use BCC so you’re not sharing email addresses without the owners permission.

But there’s another email etiquette ‘rule’ that many people still break:

Introductions

I send an email to Harry to introduce him to Sally.

Sally and Harry then start an email dialogue and I’m CC’d in all the back and forth.

I really don’t need to be, but it is good to know the intro has been followed up.

The solution then is for Sally to reply to Harry and put me in BCC instead of CC.

That way I know it’s been followed up, but when Harry replies I drop off the list of recipients and can stop writing whinging blog posts about the amount of irrelevant and unnecessary email I receive.

Simple.

Spread the word

I almost didn’t write this post. The topic has been covered by others with vastly bigger audiences than read this blog. But it seems lots of people still aren’t aware of this little piece of netiquette.

If you blog then you should write about it too – the more people that adopt it the better!

Or if you’re feeling lazy then just hit the Tweet and/or Like button below to spread the word.