Mass emails might make you a spammer

friendship or even a job.

Since I’ve already mentioned the mass mailing of jokes and Internet rumor let’s start there. I’m sure some people actually enjoy receiving mass mailings. But — take my word — many do not and are suffering in silence when you send that sort of thing.

My advice is: If it’s important to you to send out impersonal mass mailings, then ask all your intended recipients in advance if they wish to receive them. And make it easy for them to say no without hurting your feelings. Explain you realize some like to get these mailings, others don’t.

I also have advice for those who are on the receiving end of these mailings and have been reluctant to say so. You can politely explain — as I’ve done a few times — you are only asking to be removed from the mass mailings and you truly enjoy getting personal emails from that person.

Down to business

When I spent long days in a newsroom, I’d often get personal mail that was sent to my work email address instead of my personal address. Let me count the ways that is a problem.

First, it isn’t fair to my employers — they’re paying the bill for my work Internet service. Besides, I’m being paid to work, not to handle personal chores.

Second, employers have the legal right to read the mail employees receive at work — and some employers do just that. So it would be possible for the mail you receive and send to reveal personal secrets, or even criticism of bosses, to the person reading my mail.

Third, there’s already a huge amount of legitimate email in my work email account and your emails add to the clutter.

Here’s my advice: Most of us can log on to our personal email accounts while at work. If you send mail to me that way, it’s my choice as to whether or not I check that mail.

So there’s no imposition — you’ve left me in charge. That means, if I check personal email at all, I can find a convenient time to do it instead of having it pop up during my frequent checks of the work email account.

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I realize tweets and text messages have relaxed all the ordinary rules of spelling and grammar. Nothing I can say will change that. But while many will understand all those word shortcuts I often do not. And even when I do, it makes reading your email a horror.

I’m not asking for an email that reads like a formal letter from the Victorian period. But I much prefer to read an email that uses sentences, correct spelling and that has some kind of logical order. The abbreviations and symbols you use in your email creates a missive that takes longer to read and — worst yet — breaks a cardinal rule of writing by not clearly communicating what you want to say.

Don’t get forward

It is rude — and dangerous — to forward a personal email to someone else. If you feel you need to send my personal email on to another friend, ask for my permission first.

When you forward a long exchange of several back-and-forth emails there’s a risk that, somewhere in all that text, there’s a rude remark, or a secret, that you’ve forgotten is buried deep in the text. At the very least — permission to forward or not — review the text carefully to make sure there’s nothing in that mail you wouldn’t choose to share with the third person you’ve inviting into the conversation.

Now you have it — the cardinal email sins that top my personal chart. So go, and sin no more. But feel free to spam me if you have an especially effective baldness cure.