1. Use a pleasant greeting to start your email, close it off equally pleasantly, and put your name at the end. A short, one sentence email without a salutation or a sign-off appears terse at best, and demanding and rude to the reader.

2. Always have something in the subject field, make it clear and concise, and make it relevant to the current topic. (Using ‘Reply’ without changing the Subject Field for a new topic is viewed as lazy, or may be passed over as an old message.)

3. To ensure your mails are recognized as legitimate and not spam, make sure your mail program shows your proper name in the ‘From’ field. Cutesy names, or your name not properly capitalized – or even worse, all in caps – are all more likely to be filtered into ‘Junk’ or identified as spam.

4. If you’re sending the same email to several people who don’t know one another, it’s far more considerate to use the BCc (blind copy) field. If you put them all in ‘To:’ or “Cc:’, this exposes email addresses to strangers which would be viewed as a breach of privacy.

5. Choose your words carefully to mirror your real intent and meaning, and refrain from using bold text, or much, much worse, using CAPITALS for emphasis. It is frighteningly easy for your tone or meaning to be misunderstood by the reader.

6. Forwarding an email to a group of friends, especially one that you preface with “I don’t usually pass these on, but this one was so funny/interesting/shocking/meaningful” is a horribly irritating and impersonal action. If you really think someone would be interested, then forward it to him or her individually, with a thoughtfully crafted note at the beginning. Chain e-mails, ugh!

7. Our age group prides itself on ability to communications. There is therefore no excuse for lack of spell checking, grammar and proper sentence structure because this reflects a lack of education or concern, and will not please your friends. More importantly, you will want to ensure that your emails can never be misunderstood or ignored. And, you will never, ever, send an email written in anger. If you’re angry, call someone. Or if you’re writing late at night, save and don’t send until you’ve re-read it in the calm of morning light.

8. Check the Junk/Trash folder first to see if any emails from others were filtered there by mistake. You wouldn’t want to accuse others of not responding to a communication when they did so promptly, yet your email program filtered them out.

9. Acknowledge receipt of emails that contain useful information, or have helped you in some way, even if you can’t act on the contents right away. You know you’ve received it, and this is reassurance for the sender, who does not. It’s good etiquette to thank anyone who has helped you by email.

10. Before you send large attachments, first ask the intended recipient if they would be interested in what the attachments contain and when would be the best time to send them. Some files are bigger than the space for which recipients’ mail servers allow, and this can clog up their ability to receive other emails. If you ask first, the other end can keep their inbox clear.

Email is no different. It’s a case of common courtesy, consideration for feelings, with a “please”, “thank you” and “have a great day” thrown in for good measure.