Email Best Practices - Business Email Management

Turn off sounds and other notifications produced by your email program each time new mail arrives.
Why? Interruptions break your thinking and concentration.

Comment: You'll be stressed if your work demands focus and you're constantly interrupted by email, Instant Messages and phone calls. If you're a customer support person and being interrupted is part of your work, leave your focused work for quiet periods of the day. Speaking with a person over the phone whose email dings leaves you wondering whether that person is concentrating on you or their email.
Increase the interval between times that your mail program fetches new mail, or turn off off automatic fetching entirely.
Why? Your concentration is ruined by re-focussing every few minutes.

Comment: Strike a happy balance between constant re-focussing and being available. Ideally, check for new email when you're ready for it. Let your email correspondents know that you're not glued to your email and that you also may set your phone to 'do not disturb' and mark your Instant Message status as 'unavailable' when you need quiet time.
Centralize management of your organization's mail.
Why? It's impractical to sit at individual desktop computers to make, for example, email forwarding changes. This is particularly true for managing remote teleworker mailboxes.

Comment: Use an email provider or email management tools that support centralized email management.
Forward email for vacationing or sick employees to available staff members.
Why? Email needs to be responded to in a timely manner.

Comment: If Sally calls in sick, her email needs to be forwarded to another staff member who will respond to it. Find out from your email provider how to forward email.
Set up 'role' addresses for routine vendor or customer email.
Why? Organizations should ask their vendors to use a 'role' address when sending email to them to keep the organization's staff addresses private. Similarly, customers should send routine inquiries to your organization using role addresses such as 'sales' or 'support@example.com'.

Comment: Vendors and customers should not know that Sally from your billing department is going on vacation and will be temporarily replaced by Mary. For example, vendors should send mail to the 'role' address billing@example.com and not to the personal address sally.smith@example.com. Email addressed to billing@example.com is then forwarded to Sally at her sally.smith@example.com address and also to anyone else who needs to see that mail.
Certify your email when sending important documents.
Why? You may need to document the delivery of or prove that you sent a particular email to demonstrate contractural or legal compliance.

Comment: Your email provider may have tools that documents the delivery of email and also be able to prove that you sent an email with a particular content.
Set up organization-wide 'reply to' conventions to avoid unnecessary replies, and to assure that wanted replies are sent.
Why? An email recipient should know whether a reply is expected or not.

Comment: For example, reply if a message is addressed to you, but not if the message is Cc'ed to you. Another convention might be to not acknowledge an email if it has 'FYI' or 'EOM' (End of Message) in the Subject line.
Archive important email in a separate mailbox.
Why? Important email on a staff member's desktop computer can be mistakenly deleted or never saved.

Comment: For example, automatically forward email that Susan receives with the word 'contract' in the Subject line to a mailbox on your email provider's server or to a dedicated mailbox on a desktop computer in your office.
Discourage sending FYI email.
Why? To cope with expanding volumes of needed email, cut back on unnecessary email.

Comment: Frequently we send email to keep others informed. Receiving unwanted email decreases productivity. Ensure that staff members are aware of the effects of FYI email and to use it sparingly.
Signal to other staff members that they should not respond to an email by adding 'EOM' to the end of the Subject: line.
Why? This is another way to cut back on unnecessary email within the organization.

Comment: 'EOM' means 'End of Message' and it means "No need to respond". Frequently we feel that we need to acknowledge an email or thank the sender. If the sender signals 'EOM' the recipient knows that no acknowlegement is needed.
Ensure that no spam is forwarded to staff member cell phones.
Why? Receiving and deleting spam from cell phone email is exasperating.

Comment: Have a separate example.com address for your cell phone's email. For example, cell.smith@example.com. Many email providers let you filter email from selected addresses to your organizations's email addresses. For example, forward email only from anyone@example.com to Sally Smith's cell phone.
Know how long your email provider archives your mail.
Why?: Email providers may backup your mail in their long-term storage. This exposes you to legal 'discovery' of your email that is not under your control.