Effective email communication

Communication and its various nuances always fascinate me. There are times when I realize, not always too late, that I have failed in communicating what I wanted to convey. It always ends up being a learning experience for me.

For most people, the word "communication" seems to remain confined to what one says or writes. But it's far, far more than that.

I wanted to share a few tips I have learned about effective email communication over the years. I've picked these up from observation as well as from friends and colleagues. I still commit some of these mistakes when I'm in a hurry but I hope I am getting better.

•  Know your recipients. Tailor your email accordingly. Put yourself in their situation
• Their awareness of what you're talking about. Do they have prior context and how much? 
• Their environment e.g. Sharing a URL in your email that works only on Chrome (and they use Firefox), or sending URLs that don't work outside your office network.
• Their focus e.g. Are they likely to single out one out of multiple points in the email and downplay the rest? How do you address any concerns that the recipient might have? Thinking about these beforehand might you save an email iteration or more.
• Make your intentions clear. If there are actionables, point them out. If you know the owner of the action, point him/her out. If you don't, ask. If it's not an actionable email, mention it (FYI, JFYI) and explain why you are sending the email. 
• Use a meaningful subject line
• Use To, Cc and Bcc carefully
• If you're addressing one or more people in the email body, you can put them in the To field
• Be careful while Bcc'ing. If the Bcc'ed person does not realize she is Bcc'ed, she might respond to all and then everybody will know, which you might not have intended. If you're the Bcc'ed person, it's upto you to check the email headers and be cognizant of this.
• Be careful while clicking Reply. You might have meant Reply-All. Gmail/Google Apps Mail have a setting where you can set Reply All as the default.
• If the email thread has been going on for sometime, it's helpful to summarize everything, including repeating what has been already said, when a conclusion has been reached. 
• Don't clear the previous content when you respond. People often have to look at the whole thread to regain context.
• If the thread has forked off to another topic, or you want to do the forking, change the subject to something appropriate that suits the new topic.

Somebody said "Communication is about the receiver". If my recipient does not get what I'm trying to convey, I have failed, and not the recipient. This might sound extreme but it's an effective ideal to work towards.

India Needs an AntiSpam Law

The Problem
I dread it whenever I have to enter my email address at an Indian ecommerce site. It's mandatory if I am buying something, and I do it reluctantly. After the product is bought, I go to the My Account link if there is one on the site and unsubscribe from all marketing notifications (because most of the times they do not bother to tell you at the time of registering or entering your email address that you have been autosubscribed to such mails).
Note that I do not mind receiving notifications from system administrators and mails related to the delivery of the product I bought. But I do not want to keep on receiving general mails about things I am not interested in.

The inevitable happens after a couple of weeks. I get emails from the site offering me discounts on new products, new deals; in short, commercial email. Unsolicited – because I did not opt in. And in some cases I opted out explicitly. In other words, Spam. Some of these mails have an Unsubscribe link at the bottom. After you have apparently 'Unsubscribed' using the said link, one of the following things happen -

1. Similar mails keep coming, with the same Unsubscribe link. Most of these links are just mailto: links as opposed to an http: link. An http: link usually means it’s a mailing list manager software, which actually works. But a mailto: link more often than not means that somebody has to manually do the removal. Which does not happen.

2. The Unsubscribe mail bounces. Either because the Unsubscribe mailbox does not exist (Surprise!) or it has exceeded its quota because people keep on Unsubscribing and nobody reads or deletes them (Surprise!)

Here are some sites that do not have a working Unsubscribe link in their emails. All my efforts to Unsubscribe from their unwanted mails have failed. Most of these are commercial sites I use regularly.

http://www.sulekha.com
http://www.pvrcinemas.com
http://www.citibank.co.in (These guys take the cake as far as repeated requests to remove my address and repeated responses that they have done so and the and sorry-sir-it-won't-happen-again routine are concerned)
http://www.siliconindia.com
http://www.indiaplaza.in
http://www.bookmyshow.com

At this point I would distinguish between two kinds of spamming -

1. The kind I describe above. You cannot mark them as spam since you might be getting legitimate mails from the same address in future (like when you buy another product and there is a confirmation) and cannot afford to miss them.


2. The 'normal' spam that you get everyday in your junk mail folder. All mail providers detect and mark them as spam automatically. These are sent by people whose only job is to spam others, usually sitting in a country whose laws are lenient enough to allow it.
To start with, ecommerce sites need to understand that giving my email address for a necessary purpose does not imply that it entitles them send any email to that address.

My email address has a privacy status similar to my telephone number.

It’s like calling up someone every week with irrelevant news just because you happen to have their phone number. (On a related note, the Indian NDNC – National Do Not Call Registry – is a step in the right direction as far as controlling whom telemarketeers in India can call is concerned).

How do other countries deal with this?

Almost all progressive countries have laws and directives dealing with this explicitly.

EU : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Privacy_and_Electronic_Communications
Aus : http://www.dbcde.gov.au/online_safety_and_security/spam
NZ : http://www.dia.govt.nz/DIAwebsite.nsf/wpg_URL/Services-Anti-Spam-Index
US : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

Here is a more comprehensive list maintained by SpamLinks.
http://spamlinks.net/legal-laws.htm#country

More…

Then there are the ISPs (Internet Service Providers).

I have a Tata Indicom broadband connection. From time to time, these guys feel I need to know about their latest antivirus offerings, or some cool deal they have for the festive season. These mails don't even have an Unsubscribe option. When I call them up and ask to be removed from receiving these mails, the customer service people are initially clueless, and on further pressing inform me that these mails are to keep me informed. Er, what? And what if I don’t want to receive them? They say they cannot remove my email.

India needs an enforceable AntiSpam law, and now.

The Indian IT Act of 2000 and its 2008 Amendment:

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor do I claim to understand law well. The views below are based on a reading and an attempt to understand publicly available documents.

The only section in the Indian IT Act – the only law in the country that deals with cyber offences – that I could find dealing with unwanted email is Section 66(A).

        any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing
        annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or to mislead the addressee or recipient
        about the origin of such messages

Section 66(A) does not even begin to address the spam problems I describe above.

Either the existing law needs to include sections for dealing more specifically with spam or we need a standalone set of laws for making this kind of unsolicited email criminally prosecutable.