A friend of Greypath sent us an email some time ago. It asked, " Why do people do so many annoying things when they send email?" Somebody needs to set some guidelines for email etiquette!

Answer: Sending e-mail that's looks good is a reflection of your professionalism. And an e-mail that is properly written not only makes you look good, but is easier for your recipients to read . Also, if you send an e-mail that looks good, you also look like you know your way around the computer and the Internet.

Now, before you get mad at me for telling you what to do, remember, these are GUIDELINES, not rules—it's still a free country and you can do what you want.

Here are some tips to writing a winning e-mail:

• PLEASE DON'T TYPE IN ALL CAPS. IT'S HARD TO READ AND IS THE EQUIVALENT TO SHOUTING!
• Use punctuation its hard to read stuff that doesn't have any commas capital letters periods or apostrophes
• Usee yur spall chacker. Its annyang to try to reede constent spalling misstakes.
• When forwarding an e-mail to someone, copy and paste what you want to send into a new e-mail then send it off. This is especially true if you had to dig through tons of "layers" to actually get to the message of the e-mail, but if you must forward please at least REMOVE all the previous recipients e-mail addresses from the header of the message,failing to do so only proliferates Spam (Unwanted e-mail)
• Be courteous enough to use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) when forwarding an email to everyone in your address book. You don't want the addresses of your friends to get sent around the net.
• Avoid embedding sounds or using "stationary" in your messages. I know it's cute and we're all guilty of doing it, but they take longer to download and can be annoying to your recipient.
• Remember that attachments over 150kb are annoyingly long to download, possibly causing your recipient's connection to "time-out", or the email could even be blocked. Try to keep those files manageable!
• Re-read your e-mail message before you send it out. I don't know how many times I thought I had everything just right then found something that was way out of place when I re-read the document.
• When replying to a message, don't quote back the entire message if you are just responding to one or two points. Just include what you are responding to.
• Finally, don't use short hand. Stuff like "r u going to stp by ltr" can be hard to read. Don't be lazy, type the whole word.

Well, I guess that's about it. I know that I occasionally have an e-mail transgression (I think we all do), but maybe these guidelines will help everyone communicate a little better,let us hope so.