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Status
colour Green title LIVE

Email Etiquette

Basics

• Remember that you are representing the company when speaking with external parties, so be nice and write appropriately.

• Pay attention to spelling and grammar. Often this is all that your counterparty has to go by to judge your competence, so don't disappoint yourself with poor grammar.

• People hate email. If you want email to work for you: keep it short and state your request clearly and simply.

• Never use email addresses under the main @9y.co domain for development or testing purposes. This can hurt our deliverability. For that use @9y.engineering. 

• Ensure that the proper 9Y signature is at the end of your email: Email Signatures

• When you won't be reachable via email (e.g. holiday, long trip), then set an "out of office" Email Auto-Responder Out of Office .

Advanced

• Use the "To" field if you need action, and the "Cc" field if you don't need action.

• In an email chain, use reply-all per default. There are cases where you want to reply to a specific person, but know that you are purposefully excluding the rest of the group when doing so–this might be appropriate for something like a quick "thanks" email, but please be aware of the implications. You should almost always just reply-all.

• Add a valid S/MIME certificate on all devices that you send email from. Update it before it expires. Ask the CTO for help.

Pro

• If you take someone out of cc in an email chain, or add someone to it, then announce this. E.g. "Adding Chris on CC". "Taking Peter off CC as he's not part of this project".

• When you take someone off CC, e.g. in the case mentioned above "Taking Peter of CC as he's not part of the project", then you should put Peter on BCC for that email, so that he also gets informed that he got dropped and that the discussion will continue without him. If you don't add him to BCC and drop him immediately, then he might falsely assume that the convo stopped for everyone. Using BCC, rather than CC for Peter in this example is a feature of email that will ensure they don't get any more reply-alls in the future.

• When you send a fresh email and you add someone on BCC, think about the moral implications of that. Probably you should inform the other party.

• For very short emails like "Sorry, running 5 min late", you can use the convention of putting the whole message in the subject and ending with EOM. Body stays empty. For example: "Sorry, running 5 min late - EOM L" . EOM L stands for `End Of Message, Luka`.