The short version for people who want to contact me:
The long, generalized version follows...
Some people receive a lot of emails. I can receive every month up to 10,000 emails, and I imagine that some people receive a lot more emails than I do. Of course, not all of the 10,000 emails are addressed to me directly. A rough estimation would be that 2,000 emails require my attention and 600 of them need a reply.
So here's the problem: how do you get in touch with somebody receiving that many emails and similarly, if you receive so many emails, how can you organize them?
I wrote this for two reasons. First, I would like people to use email correctly so that I can save some time. And people using email the right way will get faster responses too. Second, I wanted to share my experience with email, because I am pretty happy the way I deal with it.
I guess this is yet another version of the electronic mail etiquette with pointers to tools to respect it without too much hassle.
You should format your emails on less than 80 columns (I use 70 columns so that it is still well formatted when people quote my message).
If you have a signature, it should be preceded by a signature
separator (a line with --
(dash-dash-space) on it)
and should preferably not exceed 5 lines (although if you
use the dash-dash-space separator, it is easy to strip out).
Not everybody can read Microsoft Word or other proprietary formats. Avoid using proprietary formats as much as possible.
My position on this subject is the same as Dan Connolly's:
Attachments in proprietary formats are not welcome. Don't assume I have a license to any particular piece of software (e.g. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint). Please use plain text, HTML, PDF, etc.; i.e. data formats with publicly available specifications and multiple widely-available implementations.
You should also avoid sending large files via email. Attachments larger than 100K should be avoided.
I prefer emails written in plain text, but HTML is fine.
Try to avoid embedding URLs in the text of the message, it makes the message unreadable. My preferred solution is to use references at the end of the email (e.g. Please refer to the documentation[1]. and just before the signature add 1. http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/). I wrote a macro to write URL references automatically.
Basically, if you want an answer, you have to write to the right address and use an appropriate subject.
Some people like me have different email addresses for different types of discussions. I don't use the same address for work-related emails and for private emails. Therefore, if you want to write to me, you had better write to the right email address otherwise I don't guarantee that I won't screw up and that your email won't get lost among totally different emails: e.g. I don't read my private emails very often when I'm at work, so it would be a bad idea to try this as a shortcut for something work-related and vice versa.
When some mailing lists are related to the subject of the email, it is always better (unless stated otherwise) to send the email to a mailing list rather than an individual for several reasons:
If you really want to draw somebody's attention, you can send an email to a mailing list and copy this person. But be sure that you don't do that for all your emails. If you reply to a group of people, don't use the "Reply to All" blindly: are you sure that all the recipients want to read your message?
On the other hand, if some people were copied on purpose by the sender, do reply to them too. One of this address might be, for example, the address of a group of people who might be able to reply to you too. By replying only to the sender, you are basically lowering your chances to get an answer fast.
I used to think that one way to deal with this was to use the
Mail-Followup-To header. You can read about them in some very
good documents:
I actually changed my mind about using the Mail-Followup-To
for mailing lists. It's not standard, and its necessity comes from the fact
that Reply-To is poorly implemented.
In order for your party to follow the conversation, your
message must contain threading
information (Message-ID,
References, In-Reply-To). Note that if you do
not use a client which supports those features (see my list of such clients), it will be hard for
the recipient to make sense of your email if it is part of a large email
exchange with several people.
I often receive a whole series of emails that I don't care about: I sometimes delete the whole thread once I have decided that it is not worth my time reading it. From time to time the topic of the discussion changes in the middle of the thread. Do change the subject of the email to reflect its content. Otherwise there is no way to know it by looking at a list of email at a glance!
You should also try to be concise and to strip out unnecessary quoted information. See the section about email quotes in the Jargon file. Be sure that you indicate the author of the words that you are quoting (e.g. "* Hugo Haas <hugo@larve.net> [2001-05-18 22:11-0400]" - see my notes on attribution strings in emails). See also Richard Kettlewell's quoting style.
You should avoid sending unnecessary long emails. If your email is more than 4 paragraphs long, there is a good chance that people (including me) won't read it completely, or not at all. If there is no way your email can be shortened, try to explain the gist of it at the beginning to signal interested parties that they should really read it completely, and to give others a summary of it.
Here are the rules that I apply and which work pretty well for me. Well, some people might think that they don't, but anyway:
I use Mutt as my mail user-agent and VIM as my editor. Below are a few tips to have those programs to the right thing.
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead mutt-* set textwidth=70 autoindent noruler syntax=mail
_qs as a macro to strip out quoted signatures.
Also in my .vimrc:
map _qs G?^><CR>?^> -- $<CR>d}
color index green default "~p | ~b 'Hugo|Haas' | ~s 'Hugo|Haas'"