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Email (short for electronic mail) refers to the message itself. It is the system for sending messages between computers, transferred successfully in a matter of seconds and the recipient can access and reply whenever it is convenient. Billions of messages are sent every day. Although many other ways of communicating have emerged, e-mail accounts are still at the heart of a user’s online experience since it is often the only way to create accounts to participate online, becoming the “key” to the online identity of users, serving often as a “login” to connect to all the online services they use. This is because you'll need an email address to do just about anything online, from online banking to creating a Facebook account.
To use your e-mails, you can either use the webmail service via desktop/laptop or the official app of the e-mail service on your smartphone/tablet such as the Gmail app, the Outlook app or the Yahoo! app).
Good practices on emails:
- Create strong passwords for your e-mail accounts (more than 8 characters long, combining letters, numbers and symbols) and use different passwords for each account.
- Keep e-mail messages short and to the point. Try to avoid long blocks of text. Check your spelling.
- Make sure you include relevant words in the subject line. This helps the recipient identify your message as being genuine and helps to find the e-mail at a later time.
- Include an email signature. Another reason you should include your email signature is that it’s a touch of personalization. People are naturally more inclined to read an email if they know it came from a human being, not just a collective marketing team. Your email signature is your ticket to their attention.
- Clean your mailing list regularly. An average professional receives many emails every day. It’s certainly very easy to lose control of your inbox when you have to deal with that many. For most of us, reading and responding to emails takes away lots of time in our workweek. Prioritise, group, filter and sort emails into categories to create an organised inbox. The more refined this process is, the easier it will be to locate important and specific emails at the time of need. You can also create parent categories and subcategories for various projects or clients for a superior experience.
- Don’t hesitate to hit the unsubscribe button. Unsubscribe from emails and newsletters you never read. If they were valuable and relevant to you, you’d most probably open and read them, at least from time to time. This also refers to commercial emails offering huge discounts – if you’ve never purchased anything, then you’re obviously not interested. This way, you’ll significantly declutter your inbox.
- Disable social media email notifications that can be distracting. Every little thing that goes on in your social media feed invades your inbox and ends up creating thousands of unread emails.
- Be considerate in the volume of e-mail you send out and be smart and strategic about how you communicate with others. If you need to have a group discussion with a large number of people, perhaps it is more useful to organise a conference call or a chat on a private forum rather than sending a massive amount of e-mails.
This lesson is not ready to be taken.
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