THE COMMON MISTAKES YOU MAY BE MAKING WHEN YOU EMAIL

Email has replaced traditional mails (letters) for most people and organization. Yet most people don't know how to properly use the services or options that come with email technology. As you will learn from this post, failure to understand some emailing options may cause communication problems which in turn may cause personal or business conflicts and losses.

In this post you will learn the most important options that you are likely to misuse; these are BCC, CC, Reply to all and Forward

1. The use of BCC 

You use BCC (which stands for Blind Carbon Copy) if you want to send the same email to different people but you don't want each of them to know that the other person has received the same email. For example, I have four friends that I want to send email John, Issah, Maria and Ally. 

But I don’t want John to know that I sent the same email to Issah, Maria and Ally. The same for the rest of the friends mentioned above.  To observe this confidentiality, I click BCC, and then I write email addresses of the friends above John, Issah, Maria and Ally.

It is also important to use BCC, when you don’t want to distribute email addresses of other people. For example if you want to send an email to a group of people,  use BCC so that  you don’t let other people in the group to know email addresses of others because some people don’t like their personal contacts to be distributed without their prior consent.

2. The use of CC

You use CC (which stands for Carbon Copy) to include email addresses of different people so that you can send one email to many people at a time. This is also important when you want to provide evidence to other people that you sent email to a specific person or you want to report that you have emailed to someone certain information.  For instance, you may want to report to your boss that you have already emailed a report to someone in another department within your organization, you write email address of the person you want to email to on top in the space TO….., then you click CC, and write the email address of your boss so that he or she can also see the email you sent to someone else.

 Use CC, appropriately. Recommended, use the CC only when you are sure that people involved are fine with you sharing their email addresses.

3. Forward  

You use forward option after you have received an email from someone. The forward can be used to share the email you received to other people. Again, make sure you observe confidentiality, do not forward a personal email that shares email address of someone else or other information that someone wouldn’t like you to share.

You can also use forward, to send an email that you already sent to someone else. This is useful if you don’t want to use the CC and BCC or you have sent an email but you remember that someone else needed to receive the email. In this case, you simply go to sent email, choose the email you want, when it is open, go to Forward, and write the email address of the person you want to send to.

4. Reply to all

When you choose reply all, the reply you email will go to all who were also recipients of the email you are received. Let us take example, John sent email to Timmy, Johnson, Moses and Hassan, one email for all the above mentioned people at a time. John used the CC option. Now Moses wants to reply to John, he decides to use Reply to all. This email will not only go to John, but also to Timmy, Johnson and Hassan.