Email Etiquette
Good manners
• It has been said that an e-mail is closer to a telephone message than a memo or a letter. The same basic rules of good manners reply.
• Be polite - adhere to the same standards as you would during a conversation. Use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Remember that typing IN CAPITALS is construed as shouting.
• Use humour with care – e-mail is a one-dimensional medium and the recipient will not have the benefit of other information, such as voice intonation or body language, to ascertain if a message is tongue-in-cheek.
• If the e-mail is a bona fide message or request, always reply, even if only to say thanks or to acknowledge receipt. Ignoring a mail message is discourteous and confusing to the sender who may not be sure that you ever received it.
• Think before you send, especially if your message relates to a difference of opinion. The immediacy of the medium can lead to users hitting the ‘send’ key before they have time for reflection.
Style and Presentation
• Complete the subject box. This not only provides useful information for the recipient but many people (and anti-spam systems) now interpret an empty subject box as indicative of junk mail. You run the risk of your e-mail being unread and deleted if this box is left blank.
• Try to restrict yourself to one subject per message.
• Keep messages precise and to the point. E-mail messages should rarely be longer than one screen. Put important information in the first paragraph so the reader can immediately determine its urgency and relevance.
• Presentation is vital. E-mail messages should be brief and succinct but that is no reason why they should be sloppy. Therefore check spelling and punctuation before hitting ‘Send’. First impressions count, and typos and poor spelling detract from the content and credibility of your message.
• Many e-mail programs allow you to set up a default or automatic signature to be included at the end of every message. Many people use these signatures as an easy way to give their name and contact details.
• Make sure replies are in context. If your reply is a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, then include the previous message for reference.
• Take care when sending messages to multiple recipients to hide email addresses using the BCC address box if you have not been given permission to publish individuals’ personal contact details.
Attachments
• Attachments should be handled with care. For example, the longer a Microsoft Word document, the less the relative amount of disk space which it consumes. In other words, if the document is relatively short, it makes more economic use of disk space to incorporate it into the body of the message or send it as a plain text or html file.
• If a very large attachment is to be sent, it is worth checking if the recipient’s e-mail system
Has the capacity to receive it. Sometimes, it may be necessary to send it in instalments.
• Sending an attachment to a large group of people eats up disk space. A preferable means of disseminating such information is to place it on an appropriate website and e-mail the recipients with the website address.
Housekeeping
• Check your mail regularly allocating sufficient time each day or week to read through and action your messages
• E-mail security has been described as similar to that of a postcard, so bear that in mind if you are dealing with confidential information. It may be possible to use an encrypting technique when sending such data.
• Set rules for incoming messages so that they can automatically be put into folders so that email messages of a similar nature or subject can be grouped together and dealt with consecutively.
• Identify email messages that need to be brought to other people’s attention.
• Keep email messages in personal folders only for short-term reference. Emails that are required for longer purpose should be managed as records. (See Section 5, Email Records Management below.)
• Delete email messages that are no longer required for reference purposes or messages that kept elsewhere as records from the in and out-box.
General
• Remember that the laws of the land relating to written communications apply equally to e-mail messages, including legislation relating to contract, defamation, data protection and freedom of information.
• Don't extract and use text from someone else's message without acknowledgement.
• And keep in mind that sending e-mail from your Queen’s account is similar to sending a letter on headed notepaper, so any message you send is a reflection on the College.
Email Records Management
Identifying Email Records
· When an email message is sent or received, a decision needs to be made about whether the email should be captured as a record and added to a formal record keeping system where it can be managed alongside related records and disposed or archived as necessary.
· The principles underlying which email messages should be captured as part of a formal record keeping system are broadly the same as those used to identify records in any other medium. In general, decisions on which records should be retained are dictated by legislation, internal regulations and their value to the College in terms of their administrative, legal, fiscal and archival/historical importance.
· Decisions should also focus on informational content rather than format and the context of a document within an overall business transaction or activity so that adequate evidence of that transaction or activity can be preserved for future reference.
· Email messages that might constitute a record are likely to contain information relating to business transactions that have or are going to take place, decisions taken in relation to a business transaction or any discussion that took place in relation to a transaction. For example, during the decision to put out a tender document for a particular service, background discussion about what this should and should not include might take place via email and should be captured as a record.
Who is Responsible?
As email messages can be sent to multiple recipients there are specific guidelines to indicate who is responsible for capturing an email as a record:
• For all email messages, the sender of an email message, or initiator of an email dialogue that forms a sequence of email messages
• For external messages received by one person, the recipient.
• For external messages received by more than one person, the person responsible for the area of work relating to the message. If this is not clear, it may be necessary to clarify who this is with the other people who have received the message.
Managing Email Records with Attachments
· Where an email message has an attachment both should be kept as a record as the email message will provide the context within which the attachment was used.
· There are instances where the email attachment might require further work, in which case the email message and the attachment should be captured together as a record and a copy of the attachment stored in another location to be worked on. In these circumstances the copy attachment that was used for further work will become a completely separate record.
When to Manage Email Records
· Most email messages will form part of an email conversation sequence. Where an email sequence has formed part of a discussion it is not necessary to capture each new part of the conversation i.e. every reply, separately as a record. There is no need to wait until the end of the conversation before capturing the email sequence as several subjects might have been covered.
· Sequences of emails should instead be captured as records at significant points during the conversation rather than waiting to the end of the conversation because it might not be apparent when the conversation has finished.
Where to Manage Email Records
· Depending on existing departmental practice, email messages that have been identified as records should either be:
• printed to paper and placed on file within a manual filing system or
• saved electronically (.msg format) as part of an electronic filing system (preferably in a folder stored on a shared/public drive which is subject to regular back-ups).
· In both cases, staff must ensure that appropriate subject headers and other transactional information about the message (i.e. who the message has been sent to or received from, dates and times etc) have been retained. These are required to ensure their long-term integrity and authenticity as evidence (e.g. recording of metadata) and continued accessibility.
· Once an email message has been captured as a record it should be deleted from the email client. All other messages should be deleted as soon as possible by staff from individual and group mailboxes.
Encryption and Managing Email Records
· Where it is known that an email has been encrypted it is important that it is unencrypted prior to capturing it as a record. If an email record is captured without being unencrypted it is highly likely that there will be problems with accessing the record over a period of time
Document Retention and Disposal Policy
· The retention and disposal of email messages that have been identified and captured as records within a formal record keeping system must be managed in accordance with an established departmental retention schedule.