Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips

This document offers 10 tips to help you write effective professional e-mails. The informal e-mails you exchange with your friends don't have to meet any particular standards, of course, but if you want to be taken seriously by people who use e-mail frequently, you should know e-mail etiquette.

Bauer, Jessica. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (2001). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email

You Can't E-Mail Face Time—Employees Want Bosses Up Close and Personal

Face time. According to the fourth annual survey of the North American workplace, from Netherlands-based staffing organization Randstad, those two words best describe the most preferred way for employers to communicate with employees. The 2003 Employee Review is based on findings from 2,826 telephone interviews conducted by RoperASW, making it one of the most extensive employee attitude surveys conducted in the U.S. “E-mail is far behind face-to-face meetings as the means of communication most preferred by employees,” said Joanne Reichardt, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs for Randstad North America. “In short, everyone wants face time.”

Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Email

Review: You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online  

This book addresses the issues of online writing and particularly writing e-mail, which should concern all us who spend a good chunk of our days in front of a computer screen creating and replying to e-mail messages. The book is structured in three parts: 'The virtual mensch,' 'Alpha mail,' and 'Words of passage.'

Crawley, Charles R. Technical Communication Online (2002). Articles>Reviews>Style Guides>Email

The Use of Electronic Mail in Biomedical Communication    

Publication in general medical journals stimulates more conventional than electronic mail. However, the content of e-mail may be of greater scientific relevance. Electronic mail can be encouraged without fear of diminishing the quality of the communications received.

Costello, Richard, Anthony Shaw, Roz Cheetham and Robert J. Moots. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (2000). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical>Email

Ten Tips For Your First Email Campaign

I’ve seen too many web designers dive into their first email marketing project before doing the proper planning. There are some basic things you need to square away before you send your first email newsletter.

Chestnut, Ben. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Email

The History of Attachment Security in Outlook, Part 1

A partial history of why Outlook has so, so many viruses communicated using it, and how people at Microsoft thought to try and stop it. A study of why minor patches can't repair major architecture issues.

Lemson, K.C. KC on Exchange and Outlook (2008). Articles>Software>Email>Security

Configuring Information Rights Management for Messaging in Outlook 2003

Information Rights Management (IRM), a new feature in Microsoft® Office 2003, can help prevent sensitive information from being distributed to or read by people who do not have permission to access the content. In Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, users can create and send e-mail messages with restricted permission to help prevent messages from being forwarded, printed, or copied and pasted. Microsoft Office 2003 documents, workbooks, and presentations that are attached to messages with restricted permission are automatically restricted as well.

Microsoft (2004). Articles>Software>Email>Security

Managing Email Overload

One of the most fundamental tools used in any form of e-business is email, but most of us don't really think about it - we just use it out of habit, not with any real plan. And as business becomes ever busier it's easy to become inundated with email and fall so far behind that it becomes useless and customers get frustrated with lack of responsiveness.

Oxer, Jonathan. Internet Vision Technologies (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email

Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages

Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Email

Summarizing Email Conversations with Clue Words  

Accessing an ever increasing number of emails, possibly on small mobile devices, has become a ma jor problem for many users. Email summarization is a promising way to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a new framework for email summarization. One novelty is to use a fragment quotation graph to try to capture an email conversation. The second novelty is to use clue words to measure the importance of sentences in conversation summarization. Based on clue words and their scores, we propose a method called CWS, which is capable of producing a summary of any length as requested by the user. We provide a comprehensive comparison of CWS with various existing methods on the Enron data set. Preliminary results suggest that CWS provides better summaries than existing methods.

Carenini, Giuseppe, Raymond T. Ng and Xiaodong Zhou. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Email

Does Email Communication Increase Participation in Organizational Decision Making?

One of the main issues crossing the fields of organization theory, communication theory, and information technology is whether email communication does increase participation in decision making. Common sense and some case studies suggest the so-called "democratization argument": since email allows direct (non-filtered) communication between people and identity/status concealment, it enhances more freely and easy participation in decision making.

Biggiero, Lucio. Social Science Research Network (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Organizational Communication>Email

Is Your Email Businesslike — or Brusque?

Anyone whose ever been part of an online "flame war" has had the experience of a tiny "e-mole" becoming a mountain. Studies have shown that readers add (or invent) emotional bias that is often counter to your intent as the sender. In this case, all of the niceties you thought you were writing ended up sounding very different in the mind of your employee.

Silverman, David. Harvard University (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email

Web Writing for Email

Learning about writing for the web has made me a better email communicator and project manager. Email would be much more effective if content was broken out in easy-to-understand sections with a clear guide for next steps at the end.

Johnson, Beth. Brain Traffic (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email

Ars Dictaminis Perverted: The Personal Solicitation E-mail as a Genre    

Phishing e-mails deceive individuals into giving out personal information which may then be utilized for identity theft. One particular type, the Personal Solicitation E-mail (PSE) mimics personal letters—modern perversions of ars dictaminis (the classical art of letter writing). In this article, I determine and discuss 19 appeals common to the PSE. These appeals were established first by conducting generative rhetorical analysis, then by volunteer coding, on 170 e-mails collected over a 12-month period. After defining these categories, I show how these letters are excellent twenty-first century teaching tools for pathos-based argumentation, logical appeals, the creation of ethos, and kairos in the development of perceived exigency.

Ross, Derek G. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Email>Rhetoric

Practitioners' Views About the Use of Business Email Within Organizational Settings: Implications for Developing Student Generic Competence    

Although extensive research has been done on teaching emails and on the use of emails in organisations, little research exists about how to incorporate organizational practitioners' views as the voices of the community of social practice. To remedy this pedagogical gap, this article uses a genre approach to discuss organizational practitioners' views on the use of email in organizational settings. It also develops seven teaching and learning stages for situated learning and teaching in business communication based upon the presented study findings.

Zhu, Yunxia and Catherine White. Business Communication Quarterly (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email