If you want to effectively look after yourself online, one of the main areas that you will always need to be aware of is your emails. There are so many potential ways in which your email can be vulnerable, and it’s hugely important to make sure that you are not allowing those vulnerabilities to take over. As it happens, it’s relatively easy to make sure that you are taking proper care with your emails, but you’ll have to focus on a few core elements if you are going to make that work.

In this post, we are going to consider some of the best ways to take care with your emails that you will want to bear in mind. All of these are really going to be important as you try to protect yourself online and keep yourself and your sensitive data as safe as possible.

Think Before Sending

It’s a simple rule, but one that could save you a lot of trouble in the long run. It’s easy to fire off a quick message, especially if you are in a hurry. But sloppy email practice can cause confusion, waste time and worse, so if you are not careful you might end up coming off as unprofessional or even careless. Before you send your emails, therefore, it’s prudent to ask yourself whether what you are sending is clear, necessary, and whether you are sending it to the right people. These are simple enough questions to ask yourself, and yet they could save you a heap of trouble.

Consider Your Tone

With the written word, tone is doubly important, because people are not actually able to hear you and you need to take extra care with what you are saying. This is one reason that good writers tend to make good email practitioners, but you don’t have to be a professional grade writer to be able to learn from this. In fact, you can improve upon this by just being a little more conscious about the lack of tone in email, and the lack of body language, and doing all you can to alleviate that.

Because email can sound very direct or even rude, you’ll find that a simple ‘thanks’ or ‘please’ can go a long way, so that is the kind of thing that you will want to really bear in mind here in particular.

Take Care With Subject Lines

This is another area that people often don’t put quite enough thought into, and it’s vital to make sure that you are taking care with it. If you want to get your approach to emails right, you need to think about what your subject lines are saying – but also what they are not saying. A vague or completely empty subject line is a missed opportunity, whereas a very clear subject line is going to help your message get noticed and prioritized. As such, you can think of them as like headlines, and the more concise and specific you can make them, the more relevant they will be, and the more people will be glad to pick up the email and reply to you. So that is a really important thing that you should bear in mind here for sure.

Always Proofread

Don’t simply rely on your email program’s spellchecker, because these internal checkers are often incomplete and poor, and you’ll find that it’s always best to have a human touch in the end. Similarly, you should try not to simply let AI do the work here, as a good thorough proofread by a human will go a long way towards making the email sound much more human and therefore being so much more likely to work well for you.

You are going to get a much more positive response, and generally be perceived as a lot more professional, if your emails are properly proofread, so this is something that is really worth thinking about, especially if you tend to let this element of writing emails go.

Keep On Top Of Security

Another major issue when it comes to email is security, and this is something that you will really need to make sure you are thinking about if you want to keep up with your email practice on the whole. Email is actually one of the main ways that people can get into your systems, whether you are thinking just of yourself or of your organization as a whole. Keeping on top of security is therefore hugely important when it comes to emails.

The main thing you might want to do is to train yourself on how to spot phishing emails and to know what to do about them – which is mostly to ignore them and delete them. You can also use DMARC for email protection if you want an extra line of defense in stopping those phishing emails getting to you in the first place. However you approach it, just make sure that you do actually have an approach towards your security that you can make use of in this sense.

Know When Not To Email

In all this, there is one last point that you should definitely try to keep in mind, and it’s around when not to email. Sometimes, an email isn’t actually the right medium, and it’s better to go another way entirely. If your message is going to be emotionally charged, complex to explain, or likely to lead to a lot of back and forth clarification, then you might want to take a quick call or have a meeting instead. These are the kinds of things that you are going to find really helpful when it comes to those subjects, more than with email.

As you can see, there is quite a bit to consider about emails, but as long as you have got those right you should find that you are able to improve your ability to email quite easily.

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