All the Etiquettes and BEST PRACTICE of Emailing that Everyone Should Adopt at Work
THIS HAS been the long buried ongoing work in my mind based on 22+ years experience working and using e-mails (mainly Outlook) in an office environment. Many of these are also applicable when using personal email client like Gmail, but the focus is on work e-mail.
EMAIL SUBJECT
» When composing a new email, never ever leave the email subject blank. You want your email to attract some attention. It will make it easier for you to search too.
Always use the key words of the issue (or request) at hand as the subject.
Tips: Don't put your instruction there. This should be in the email body.
Don't put in too many words either because the last words will get cut off (not visible)
Try not to use just 1 or 2 words or too general words.
Make sure the subject contains relevant words that you think you would use in the future when searching back about this topic in the past.
On other hand, if you receive an email with a 'blank' subject, do put in some key words in the subject when replying. This is particularly important when you think the email thread will be long and full of replies.
» When replying to an email already with a subject, please do not change the subject. After several exchanges, conversations with the same subject can be sorted by clicking on the subject heading to display all the email chain with the same thread. If you (or someone else) changed the subject, it will break off the conversation thread.
Some exceptions to this rule:
a. When the subject used by the first sender is erroneous or misleading (please change when you reply in the first instance)
b. When flow of the conversation has shifted to another topic that deserves a more relevant subject. This is not uncommon. But I would only change the subject if I think the email exchanges on the new topic will still carry on for another good few rounds.
EMAIL RECIPIENTS
» When replying to an email that was also copied to (an)other person(s), always click 'Reply All' as a courtesy to the sender. When someone copies other people in an email, the sender expects the response to that email to be read by everyone in the email loop because he/she thinks the email topic is relevant to those other people. So please respect that!
I need to emphasise this because I found a lot of people simply refused to do 'Reply All' and just clicked 'Reply' avoiding other people in the CC fields. Which means the sender must forward the email reply to those copied, or copy their email addresses again when replying further to the responder.
An exception to this rule is when the responder has a strong reason either business-related or personal-related as to why he/she would rather not include the other recipients yet in their response. A phone call (or separate message) to the sender would usually be helpful.
» When replying to an email that was only sent to you, try not to add someone else into the email loop to respect the sender. Do that by replying to the sender only. You may add someone else by cc-ing your colleague (or even your boss) only if you have reasonably good reason to do so. Even that you need to be sensitive and apply caution. You don't want to create a wrong impression of dobbing the email sender in to the CEO, for example. I'd usually only add someone else to the chat when I think my team members need to know about that request, or if my fellow manager may have more information about the question asked than I do myself.
Exceptions: You can add someone else to the email conversation when you think it's necessary or relevant and reasonable to do so. For example, you needed your team member to be in the loop because you would be on leave in case the sender needs to follow up on that request or question. Another case is when the sender asked you about something that you need to discuss with your boss first before you respond appropriately. Your boss might even ask you to copy him/her when you respond. Then it's perfectly fine to cc them in your email reply. Or, it could be that the sender wrongly emailed it to you and you know your colleague sitting across your desk is the best person to respond to that email.
» Try not to use Bcc (blind copy). I would actually discourage you to use Bcc field.
The reasons are people who get Bcc-ed may click Reply or Reply All and your email sender will know that you Bcc someone else without their knowledge. It won't look good on you!
If you need to let your colleague know that you have sent an email to Vendor ABC but you didn't want to cc anyone else there, simply go to your Sent folder, and forward that email to your colleague. Using Bcc could be perceived as being 'creepy'.
» Leave the To/CC fields blank when composing an email.
It happens all the time when someone hit the 'Send' button too quickly or accidentally. Result? You sent an email that you didn't want to send, or haven't finished typing.
My solution? Easy. Remove all the recipients first (in both To and CC fields) while composing a fresh email or even when replying to an email. Only after you're completely happy with your message (and don't forget your attached files if you send any), start adding the people names in To (and CC) fields.
Exception: You can skip this step if the message you're typing is a short one, or an easy one like a simple acknowledgment or yes/no response.
» You cannot undo sending an email.
Outlook has a 'Recall Message' feature, but you can't rely on it. It doesn't always work. From experience (it's August 2025 today), you can recall the email you've just sent if it's sent to internal organisations only and hasn't been opened. There may be a time limit too. In the past, I was a recipient of emails being recalled but I could still view the emails. So, what's the point of recalling it?
My advice is you just can't rely on undoing the email send in Outlook. Hence refer to my previous point about deleting all the recipients first while composing a message. Prevention is better than cure!
Gmail is actually better able to Undo sending an email so long as it's still under 30 seconds. Just hit the blue 'Undo' right after hitting 'Send' next to the 'Message sent' message at the bottom.
» Please do reply 'Done' (or any words you like to that essence) to an email from your boss or colleague asking you to do something after you completed the task as requested. Do not assume they know that you've done it. Do not think that you will be flooding their email with just such a simple message. There are so many other junk (useless!) emails that will do the flooding. So your short "done" message is nothing like those numerous newsletters they subscribe to, for example. The reason for this email etiquette is empathy. Put yourself in their shoes: If you ask someone to do something, you want to know whether it's been done or not. Because if they haven't done it, or can't do it for any reason, you can reassign someone else to do it, or perhaps do it yourself. Such useful, simple email will also be helpful in the future as it shows the paper trail and date/timestamp when you got the job done.
I know some people reply to a request email with "Will do.". This is better than nothing. But it depends on the time needed to do the job. If it takes you hours to complete the job and you won't be able to get it done today, yes please respond "Will do." (or better with the estimated timeframe). But if it's something that only takes you a few minutes to do it (like sending a bank statement to another staff or checking the payment status of a vendor's invoice), please do the job first and then reply to the email with "done" or the requested info) so it's more efficient in your emailing with them... rather than saying "will do" but your response never arrived in their inbox or you would end up replying to their question AFTER they chase you with another email.
TIDINESS/CLEANLINESS
» Maintain Zero Inbox policy. A lot of people have hundreds and hundreds of unread emails in their inbox. I can't understand why they like to keep unread emails. You're actually running the risk of not reading the message you're meant to read. For me, if I keep any of my emails unread, I feel like I would miss out on any email that could be important for me to read or follow up. Hence I always read every single message that came into my inbox. If I can't do what the sender asked me to do
» When scanning a hardcopy document with a photocopier machine, do not send it straight to the intended recipients email address (unless you change the email subject first from the machine, but I highly doubt you ever did this) because it will have meaningless or blank subject with an unrecognised file name.
Many a photocopier would give a default email subject like "Message from RNP583879205FC7" with PDF file name that contains a long string of numbers, both of which are just rubbish with no helpful information.
Always select your own email address first from the photocopier. Then change the subject before you send it on to the recipients. Better still, add some words in the email body as introduction or purpose why you sent that scanned document.
Also, please don't forget to delete the "Fwd" in the subject when you click the Forward button because you're not actually forwarding anything. It was you who started the email.
» Cut out the accumulating email disclaimer statements before replying.
Nowadays most outgoing emails include that disclaimer notice placed under email signature to limit liability or minimise legal exposure. This is necessary and important. On average, an email conversation would be responded 4-6 times (if not more) back and forth between everyone in the loop. When this happens, the disclaimer continues to be added at the tail of each conversation responded. So you can imagine how extra longer the whole email chain would be. Some people choose to print this email chain to printer or to PDF which means the printed email extends to more pages than necessary. The most wasted part is when the whole email conversation could use up to only 4 pages, but because of one extra line of the disclaimer brought forward from page 4, the printed email extends to page 5 with just 1 line at the top there. What a waste of one whole A4-size paper! The same can be said with printed PDF. It's going to be a waste of bigger file size. It's not uncommon when the extra pages due to this multiple duplicated disclaimer could be 2-3 pages by itself because of the number of times that conversation was responded to back and forth by so many people involved. My habit? Before I click 'Reply', I always cut out all but one of the repeated disclaimers at the bottom. Even that I realised that as soon as someone replies to my email, that single set of disclaimer there will become TWO!!!
» FONT and SIZE. Always use moderate, widely acceptable yet nice looking font type like Calibri or Arial with size 11 (or maximum 12).
Recently Microsoft changed the default font to Aptos which is a new font that didn't exist previously. I found Aptos' appearance fine for emails despite slightly bigger than Calibri. However, because it is a new font, not just newly made to default, you'd probably find an issue when printing your email to PDF. Adobe PDF does not have Aptos font installed yet. Hence it won't print correctly. I had to research online how to find a way around it. My 2 cents? Change your default email font back to Calibri for both compose and reply. If you received an email already using Aptos and you need to print it, you have to uncheck the "Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts" in the Adobe PDF Settings tab in Printer properties. To make it permanently unchecked, you need to go to your printer settings in Windows and apply the change in Printing preferences.
» Search TIPS: Don't use the Search bar (just yet!)
Most people would jump straight to the search bar and type in anything they want to search like the person name along with the keyword. While this method often provides good results quickly, but it's not always the most effective. The reason is that there could be emails not captured by the words that you put in the search bar. For example, you're looking for Michael Jordan as the Sender only. So you type in "michael jordan" in the Search bar. Results? You'll get all emails that had "Michael Jordan" as sender OR one of the recipients. But if you sort the Sender first (in ascending order) by clicking the field Name at the top AND type letter M (for Michael) or J (for Jordan) [depending on whether your name appearance setting is First_name Last_name or Last_name, First_name], you'd get emails with just this name as the Sender which is what you want. You'll have fewer results. Quicker to find what you need. The same goes if you are after the chain of an email talking about a certain topic. Try to sort the subject by clicking the Subject field at the top first.
» Use the Search bar only when you're looking for more specific items. E.g. I would type in "from:Michael Jordan finance mapping" in the search bar if I need to look for all emails sent by Michael Jordan with "finance mapping" in the email subject or body.
» Combine emails with other means of comms. The use of emails is very crucial for communication at work. But in many cases, email should be combined with phone calls, or avoided altogether in favour of face-to-face meeting be it online or in person. Sometimes an email only works effectively just to confirm in writing the outcome of the previously conducted 1:1 audio/video calls. The in-person meeting takes place first to get the other person's understanding or support so as to minimise a back and forth exchange of emails which usually happens on a delicate matter.
MINDSET
» Develop a future mindset. When composing or replying to an email, do it with full intent that all your words and numbers will be searchable in the future. Therefore, I would deliberately use all the keywords, type in dollar amounts, invoice numbers, references, or anything that I think the "future me" will use to search for such a message. I found that this will help myself (and others) a lot down the track thanks to doing this extra little step now. A stitch in time saves nine, goes the proverb.
» Compose, reply, or forward any email with full consciousness that it could and would be seen by the whole world, published by the mainstream and social media. In this day and age, anything that you write or leave in digital footprint can easily be forwarded, shared, or spread to anyone. Be prepared for that by writing/acting on a message that you think would be safe and okay (not causing embarrassment to yourself or anyone) if it were to be exposed to the public.
Note:
This is an ongoing post. I will continue to add more points and update this post to make it more 'ultimate'.
