E-mails: framing

Replying and framing

Before you reply to an e-mail or forward it to somebody, there are a number of things you should be careful about. What are they?

Check the address: If you forward or reply to an e-mail, don’t press “send” until you have checked the recipient’s e-mail address. Use the “Reply all” function carefully. Check who is on the list, especially if the e-mail contains sensitive information.

Subject-line “RE” and “FW”: Leave the automatically generated “RE” or “FW” if you wish, but delete it if there is already one there. More than one is ugly.

Subject-line comments: Help the recipients of your e-mails to prioritize the messages in their in-boxes by changing the subject line slightly or by adding a short, helpful comment to the original (“Attached”). Alternatively, write a new, more relevant subject line. Don’t make it too long, though, and avoid using too many punctuation marks or capital letters, or your e-mail could be mistaken for spam.

Delete irrelevant text: In the body of the e-mail, delete all unnecessary information when you forward or reply to an e-mail. With mass e-mails, delete the addresses of all the recipients that appear in the body of a reply or of a forwarded e-mail, as well as all signatures other than your own.

Use framing: If you wish to refer to the original message, keep the relevant text in your reply or in your forwarded mail. Also, keep the brackets, lines or different colour that your e-mail program generates to show that the text is from an earlier mail. Add your comments within the old message. This is called “framing”. Don’t add your comments to the end of a long message. The recipients may not scroll down to find your message.

Create a new message: Don’t reply to an old e-mail just to avoid typing in the address. Use your address book and write a new subject line.

On the next page, you can see an example of how an e-mail reply could look. 

Deborah Capras