Alex's Tech Thoughts

This may seem very simple- but you would be surprised how many people suck at email etiquette.

David Tisch, the managing director of TechStars, teaches a class on Skillshare called “How to Talk to Your Investors.” If you ask David, he informally calls that class “How to Stop Sucking at Email.”

While I haven’t taken his class, I have made my own list of three things to do when you receive or plan to send email. I won’t even go into the fact that the email should be short, five sentences if you can help it.

• The first thing you should do when you receive an email is check who sent it (from which email address specifically- work or personal) and if anyone was Cc’d on it. So many people forget to Reply All and include the Cc’d people in their response. This means the recipient needs to re-add those people. Ugh. 

• If you are sending an email, make sure you check who it is going to, who is Cc’d, who is Bcc’d. You do not want to be this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaO8WltLmEk.

• If you are emailing someone to ask for something that would require them to forward it on, either make the original email something forward-able (is this a word?) or after they give you the okay, re-send them a fresh email with the info to forward on. If you don’t, you are just giving extra work to and impinging on the time of the person doing you a favor.

These were three obvious ones that jump out to me- What else would you say are the absolute basics of receiving and sending email?