Writing Good EMail

I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to leave email in my "in" box for future reference. The mail software I use for my personal account, Thunderbird, makes it easy to sort messages by sender, so I can find messages, and the mail server I use for work, Gmail, allows search by any text string, so I can find most mail that way. But when I am scanning a list of mail from a single person, it sure helps if the message titles are meaningful. This is one of the tips mentioned in this excellent article at Office Watch about creating good email. By the way, that site is full of good information about a range of software subjects - The Office for Mere Mortals section describes how to do any number of things in Office that you might find useful: working with Watermarks in Word, for example.

And in the meantime, make sure your email titles mean something. "Check it out" is not as useful as "Picture of the Recent Blizzard."