Here are seven easily avoidable mistakes you should know about to keep your image and inbox in tip-top shape.

 

1. Failing to follow e-mail etiquette. I believe in the old adage, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." There's no point in belaboring the etiquette issue. We all know we should be polite. But here are a few points to consider:

 

-Don’t write when you are angry. Wait at least 24 hours when you are more calm and reasonable and have someone edit your e-mail.

 

-Please don’t use sarcasm - your recipient will be put off. -Do not use all UPPERCASE, this is the e-mail equivalent of yelling. Also go easy on the exclamation marks, too many dulls the effect.

 

-Use clear subject lines. This will help your recipient decide whether to read the e-mail now or later depending on urgency.

 

-Keep it Short. If an e-mail is over two paragraphs long maybe you should use the telephone.

 

-Change the subject line if you change the topic of a thread. -Unless the recipient has previously agreed, don't forward poems, jokes, virus warnings and other things. You're just wasting valuable time and bandwidth.

 

2. Thinking you are anonymous. If you are sending nasty missives, you might think no one will be able to figure out that the e-mail came from you. After all, you set up a phony Web address. Think again. E-mail contains invisible information about the sender.

 

3. Sending e-mail to the wrong person. Today's e-mail programs want to make it easy to send e-mail. This means that when you start typing the address of a recipient to whom you have previously sent mail, the "To:" field may already be populated. Be careful. Always double-check the recipient is the intended one. In addition, if you're writing something ugly about Joe Smith, you'll have Joe's name on your mind. Don't send it to him by accident!

 

4. Using one e-mail address for everything. Use different addresses for different subjects: private, public, online mailing lists, and another for when you go shopping online. These addresses attract mail for those specific areas. If you don’t want that many, you should at least have a separate junk mail account where everything besides work, friends and family letters are sent. Most providers will give you a half-dozen e-mail accounts. You can also use addresses on the Web for personal accounts. Both Hotmail and Yahoo! are good. You can reach those accounts from anywhere, assuming you have Web access.

 

5. Forgetting to check all of your e-mail accounts. Don’t!

 

6. Clicking "Send" too fast. Reread every e-mail before you send it! People will judge you subconsciously on mistakes. None of us is perfect. But you can catch 99% of these problems by rereading the text. And don't depend on the spell-checker. It will catch misspellings. But if you use "four" instead of "for," or "your" for "you're," it won't tell you. It also is not likely to catch any missing words in a sentence that you inadvertently failed to include. So take a minute and reread your text. Don't look like an ignoramus.

 

7. Forgetting the attachment. This seems obvious, but since we all do it occasionally, it shouldn't be a huge deal. However, if you consistently make this mistake, people (perhaps important people) may think you're losing your marbles. They might even hesitate to do business with you in the future.

 

When you get ready to send your e-mail, think: "What am I forgetting?" E-mail is almost like talking. We use it so much that we don't really think about it. But there are rules and courtesies, just as there are with talking. And there are other considerations involved in communicating by written word only.

Giving them some additional thought could make your e-mail experience more satisfying and your recipients much happier.