EMail Tips

In the world of eMails, many a times, we receive some emails, which I will simply call as orphans mails. Though the writer has tried his best to convey the message, but the message is not properly conveyed or is misunderstood or even doesn’t belong to the recipient. Even these emails are related to some category but doesn't specify any category information in subject or message body. It is very common to get a lot of mails on daily basis. This becomes very difficult to store these mails appropriately. Here are some points which will enable anyone to manage their mailboxes in an appropriate manner and also help in utilizing the network bandwidth properly etc. Though these tips are most useful for software professionals, I have tried my level best to make these tips as general.

Software Developers only

1. Mention the Release/Version/Category information in the subject if the mail is related to a Release.
2. Release specifies the release number if this email is related to a specific release i.e. [1.0.0]
3. Version specifies the Document Release i.e. Draft 0.A or Issues 1.0 etc.
4. Category specifies the category of the Document i.e.  UTS/ LLD/ TESTING/ SystemTesting/ PerfTesting/ Internal Review/ External Review/ SignOff/ Request for Approval etc.
5. Do not provide the network path for External mails as the network path/Local Path may not be available to external community instead use FTP location or a common VSS path.
6. Upload the files on onsite VSS and provide the VSS path wherever applicable.

General User

1. Never send an image file using BMP format instead use jpg. (Sometime the diff in storage space if more than 7-8 times)
2. Do not send attached any file unless and until it is mandatory. Still if required compress the file using any compression utility[Preferably WinZip] before sending.
3. Try sending the attachments as separate mail instead of sending it with alongwith Invite.
4. Try not to send attachments after office hours especially on Fridays as people will not access their mails on Saturday or Sunday and due to limited space allocated to mailboxes these mails itself can be bounced or let the other mails bounced if the mailbox is full.
5. Take care while sending the meeting requests and choose the suitable time if the attendees are on different geographical locations.
6. Always keep the recipients in TO list from whom you want a response and keep in CC all those who are being informed only.
7. Use full signature while sending the mails. It should contain your name, Role, Project, Location and contact Details. It will help the recipient to reach you in some urgent cases.
8. Use your email address in the signature as sometimes the recipient will get your Friendly name and not the email address in the TO/FROM fields.
9. Use standard fonts (Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, Courier etc) as you never know which email client is used by the recipient.

Here are some standard formats which can be used for email Subjects which contain maximum information in the subject line. Anything which is not applicable can be removed.

[Version Info][Document/eMail Catagory] Other contents

Samples
[20.0.1][LLD][Internal Review] Low Level Design for Document - Draft 0.A
[20.0.1][UTS][External Review] Unit testing Specification - Draft 0.A
[SignOff] Low Level Design for Document - Draft 0.A
[Request for Approval] Low Level Design for Document - Draft 0.A
[Authorised Issue] Low Level Design for Document - Issue 1.0
[20.0.1][Unit Testing] - Successfully Completed
[20.0.1][Unit Testing] - Issues Found
[20.0.1][System Testing] - Successfully Completed
[20.0.1][Performance Testing] - Issues Found

The above samples are just for informative purpose and can be changed accordingly. Hope we can get a lot of benefit by using these simple tips. Send me if you have some more tips to add.