email tips, management & resources

email & email discussion lists

Email discussion lists are a popular communications medium for historians; discussion lists allow a group of people who are list subscribers to send and receive email to the entire group automatically.

Discussion lists are asynchronous communication tools; they let you communicate with others at different times, when it is convenient. These tools override the constraints of time zones and allow for easy global communication. In a sense, they are the electronic equivalent of snail mail (letters sent via a postal service), but the delivery is so much faster. and free. In another sense, they are the similar to voice-mail messages.
Advantages - extremely convenient; varying degrees of privacy are possible; can be saved, replied to, shared.
Disadvantages - illusion of privacy; heightened expectations for response speed; information overload.

email discussion lists for gender and women's historians

H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) features more than 100 history email discussion lists including H-Gender-MidEast, H-Minerva (Women in War and Women in the Military), H-SAWH (Women and Gender in the U.S. South), H-Women, etc. Explore the Discussion Network listings.

Gender-Related Electronic Forums - "an annotated, frequently-updated, award-winning listing of publicly-accessible e-mail discussion forums (also known as "lists" or "listservs") related to women or to women-focused gender issues from Joan Korenman at UMBC.

Women's History Discussion Lists - annotated list from The International Institute of Social History WWW Virtual Library.

tips for avoiding email overload

• Check email daily | Only check email three times a day (most people)
  [See A Message About Managing Email: Enough Already]
• Delete unwanted messages immediately since they take up disk space and create "e-clutter".
• Keep the number of messages in your inbox to minimum.
• Filter messages, either when they arrive (repeat correspondence like discussion lists) or to folders after reading to archive.
• It is a good idea to extract and download important information to your personal computer.
• When signing up for ListServ and mailing list discussion groups, save your subscription confirmation letter.
• When going away for a week or more, unsubscribe or suspend mail from discussion list and use a vacation message.
• Use a separate email account for personal messages, not your business account. [Free web-based accounts available from "standard" providers like Gmail from Google, Yahoo! Mail, or Microsoft Outlook. These types of accounts can be checked from any web browser anywhere in the world.]

email management - online resources

• What you need to know about email Lifewire: Tech for Humans commercial web site - has a variety of email guides including the 10 most important rules of email netiquette
• Top Ten Tips for Overcoming Email Overload by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood, author of A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email, one of the Net's first email guides.
• Microsoft's Managing Email in and out of the Classroom - 2004 guidelines and tips for Outlook.
• HTML Writers Guild Filtering Mail FAQ - a little dated, but still provides a good overview for many email programs.

interesting related sites

• Netiquette Home Page -- from Albion.com. See the Core Rules:

  Rule 1: Remember the Human

  Rule 2: Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life

  Rule 3: Know where you are in cyberspace

  Rule 4: Respect other people's time and bandwidth

  Rule 5: Make yourself look good online

  Rule 6: Share expert knowledge

  Rule 7: Help keep flame wars under control

  Rule 8: Respect other people's privacy

  Rule 9: Don't abuse your power

  Rule 10: Be forgiving of other people's mistakess

send business email like a pro

Tech tips from DoctorGeek

More and more people rely on email for inexpensive, convenient business communication. Here are some standard email practices that will help you to present you and your business in a professional way in electronic communications.

seriously.... good professional practices

1. People should be able to recognize your email username as belonging to you. Otherwise your message may be deleted without being read. The easiest approach is to use your real name as your username for business email. First names are fine if your email address refers to your business, for example, susan @ doctorgeek.net

2. Write a subject line that clearly describes the content of your message.

3. Have a professional-looking email address. Whether or not you have a business website, get a business email address and use it only for business communication.

   • For professional looking business email, use an email service that doesn't insert an advertisement at the bottom of YOUR message.

   • You can buy a custom business email address (email @yourbusiness.com) without a website. If you follow that route, be certain to check what your domain (yourbusiness.com) looks like.... it may have someone else's advertising!

   • For a bit more than a custom business email address, you can buy a simple, informative one-page website that gives web visitors a good sense of who you are.

4. Use an email signature (sig) at the bottom of your message so people know how to contact you. 

   • Your sign-off/signature should include your full name, title, company, and business telephone number.

   • Although your email address is on your message, some people believe that your email address should be in your sig too. Frankly, I put my email address in my personal email sig, and not my business email sig. That's based on perhaps an unwarranted assumption that business correspondents are more technically savvy than friends and family.

   • Include a fax or cell phone number, website address, Skype username, instant message username and/or company tag line - ONLY if it enhances your your business communications.

   • Your snail mail (conventional postal service) address should be included when needed. In a signature, your entire address can be on one line, with comma separators,
     for example: your street address, suite number, city, state, zip code

   • Show restraint with the size of your sig. It should be smaller than most messages that you send! Try to keep it to 4 lines....

   • Set your email program to automatically include your signature on all outgoing business email. You may want more than one sig, a short one for people at your company and a longer one for "outsiders".

5. Reply to email in a timely manner, generally within 1 to 2 business days.

   • If it'll take longer, send a timely reply acknowledging the message & indicate when you'll be able to respond more fully.

   • When away for an extended period of time (for a vacation, conference, illness, etc. where you will have limited or no access to email), set up an auto responder on your business email account.

6. Write sincerely & professionally. Email is silent so your recipients cannot "hear" the tone in your message - especially if they don't know you personally. What might be taken as "joking around" in person can be read as stupid or arrogant or hostile in an email message. One approach to writing business email is to imagine that you're talking to the email recipient in person – in front of a dozen of his or her best friends and parents.

7. Use a separate account for personal email. Good bets are free email services like Yahoo Mail or Google's gMail. Unlike email with your Internet Service Provider, gMail and Yahoo accounts are with you for life. Do get an email account for your newborn!

email don'ts

1. For your business email account, never use a high level spam blocker that only permits messages from email addresses in your address book. A new client will probably not be in your address book.

2. Many people view spam - unsolicited email sent to large groups of people - as a nuisance.

   1. If you send business messages to a large group of people, include information at the bottom of your message about how to be removed from your mailings. This is good practice even if people sign up to receive email from you.

   2. Distinguish between networking and spamming with publicly available contact information. It's probably networking to send an infrequent message to members of YOUR chamber of commerce; if you do, use the BCC (blind carbon copy) feature of your email, not the CC (carbon copy) feature - unless there is some reason that you would want one of your chamber buddies to "reply to all.

3. Try not to use all capital letters in your subject line and message UNLESS IT'S REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT. All caps are like shouting. If you have a critical message for one person, the telephone is more effective and reliable than email. For a group message, one word in caps is often effective. Setting a message to high priority in your mail program might help too.

4. Avoid sending large unsolicited attachments, for example a large PDF. It's best not to send any unsolicited attachments. To send large solicitedattachments, consider using a free trustworthy service like dropbox.com.

5. While timeliness is important, avoid the temptation to send a quick reply from your cell phone if the email requires a detailed or delicate response. If you answer a pressing questions quickly, be sure to let the recipient know that you will follow-up with a full reply within one business day.

6. Sometimes email is not the best form of communication because the medium can be perceived as offensive (i.e., impolite, discourteous, bad-mannered and disrespectful). Official replies to a serious letter, proposal, or application received in regular mail should be sent through "snail" mail, on letterhead paper. Obviously, this is particular true for sensitive and/or distressing messages. (Thanks to K.M. @ UCLA for pointing this out.)

7. Be detail oriented. Its really poor form to start a message misspelling a person's name. Getting the name wrong is off-putting. (Thanks to N.D. for reminding me about this one.)