Managing EMail
by K. Yue

You are encouraged to communicate with me through email. The trick of writing good email is to provide context to help the reader to efficient understand and process the email.

Email communications have become both more critical and tricky. Several considerations:

  1. Crucial communications are done through email.
  2. The number of emails received everyday can be very large.
  3. EMail now serves as a central repository of important information. Email should be written and stored in a way for effective searching.
  4. EMail has become less reliable for various reasons, including being filtered by spam filter servers.

[1] Always include a meaningful and specific subject heading.

Example from capstone project course. The recipient should be able to grasp the main purpose of the email and search for it effectively. For example: the following sequence of subject headings has increasing usefulness. Comments are written inside the parenthesis.

Subject: (no heading: difficult to handle.)
Subject: Meeting tomorrow (ambiguous; not good for searching)
Subject: Meeting 9/1/2007 (better; but what kind of meeting...)
Subject: Mentor meeting 9/1/2007 2:30pm-5:00pm (better; but place...)
Subject: Mentor meeting 9/1/2007 2:30pm-5:00pm UHCL Capstone lab
Subject: Team #4 Mentor meeting 9/1/2007 2:30pm-5:00pm UHCL Capstone lab (better: the recipient almost does not need to read the email body. This is especially helpful to the instructor, who must deal with many teams.)
Subject: Agenda of Team #4 Mentor meeting 9/1/2007 2:30pm-5:00pm UHCL Capstone lab (now the recipient expects the agenda in the email body. Very searchable too.)

Some other examples:

Subject: Team #5: Questions on project Website requirements
Subject: Team #6: Request of meeting with the instructor during 9/2/2007 to 9/4/2007
Subject: Team #2: Encountered project account permission problems
Subject: Team #1: Reminder of project demonstration: 9/22/07 3:00 Capstone lab <eom>

[2] Include your class and section at the beginning of the subject heading. Include your student Id if you think it may help the instructor in the email matter.

Subject: ITEC 3335.1 SQL questions

Subject: CSCI 5333.2 UML modeling requirement in HW #1

Subject: CSCI 4333.2 Not attending class because of illness (Student Id: 1324678)

[3] Manage and follow up.

Email delivery is no longer reliable. You cannot assume that the recipients always successfully receive your email. Communications can break down. To combat this problem, you should form a habit to acknowledge email, sometimes simply by replying with a "thank you" or "got it" note. There is a balance between limiting the proliferation of emails (use "reply all" carefully) and acknowledgment.

If you have sent an email and receive no reply within a reasonable amount of time, send a follow-up email to remind the recipient tactfully. If you still do not receive any response, use other means, such as phone, instant messaging, physical visits, etc.

Make sure that you will check your account frequently. If you are not using your UHCL accounts, you may consider email forwarding from your UHCL account to your main email account. Please see:

https://www.uhcl.edu/computing/self-help/documentation/documents/email-forwarding.pdf

Because of spam filtering, email sent through your UHCL account has a better chance of reaching your instructor or TA without quarantine.

Do not use SMS style English. It is becoming very popular but is still not acceptable in many business communications setting.

[4] Know whom to send to, cc or bcc.

For example, it is not necessary to copy the instructor when discussing homework grading with the TA. However, if you feel that there may be reasons that the instructor needs to be involved, copy the instructor.