E-mails

Hi again! This time I'd like to talk about e-mails, because nowadays e-mails are so common that nearly everybody uses them, but usually not many people know how to use them in a right or effective way. So I'm going to talk about 2 main important things we should know when writing and sending e-mails.

First of all, we should know the difference between the "To:", "CC:" and "BCC:" fields, because probably many of you only use the "To:" field (before knowing the difference I actually did this too), just because you don't know what the other two are, and in fact I have realized this is a really, really, really important issue. So let's see the difference:

• "To:" should be used when you want someone to see an e-mail and you want or expect a reply. To do so, write the e-mail addresses (and/or optionally names) of the message's recipients. I guess all of you already knew this but I wanted to explain it here in order to see the difference between the following two other fields.
• "CC:" stands for "Carbon Copy" and the e-mail addresses listed in this field will receive a copy of the e-mail that is sent to the people listed on the "To:" field. This is used when you want someone to see an e-mail, but don't expect a reply. It's just to inform the people on the "CC:" about the message you have sent to the people on the "To:".
• "BCC:" stands for "Blind Carbon Copy" and is used for protecting people's privacy, so it is really important. With BCC, the identity of the people receiving the e-mail is hidden; no address entered in this field will be visible to any other person receiving the e-mail. So if you want to send an e-mail to many contacts, use "BCC:" instead of "To:", because your recipients probably won't like your other contacts to know his/her e-mail address.  

Another really important issue is the subject, which we sometimes forget about. The subject should be a brief summary of the topic of the message and it should include the most important facts or ideas you want to communicate in your e-mail. 

It is a really important field to complete because it may be the only thing the other person will read or it may be decisive to make the other person open your e-mail or not, because if you receive thousands of e-mails per day, obviously you won't read them all that day, so you will choose which ones to read depending on the subject. For example, if you see a subject which says "Information about next Monday's meeting" you may open it, but if it says "Photos from our last summer", you will surely leave it for another day.

Related to this last thing is the fact that if you want to talk about several different issues/topics, don't write one only e-mail, write one for each subject so that the recipient knows what each e-mail is exactly about.

I hope you found this post interesting and that you have learned something new!