V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Dr. E-Mail: Inventor of Email, History of Email, Free EMail Tips

If you receive a lot of E-Mail and your Inbox is getting too cluttered to focus on the important E-Mails, it would be a good idea to use filters in your E-Mail client to sort incoming E-Mail automatically.

First of all, you need to create new folders in your E-Mail client. Give them easily identifiable names like Friends, Work, Golf etc. Now you need to create filters which will act upon incoming E-Mail. You could set up a filter to send all incoming E-Mails from friends to go to the Friends folder. To do this, you need to tie your fiends' E-Mail IDs to the filter that forwards them to the Friends folder. Similarly, with other categories like Work, etc. You will find that your Inbox does not look too intimidating soon enough!

The great element of E-Mail is that you read it when you want to read it. Those who check E-Mail every five minutes are using E-Mail in an undisciplined fashion. Reading and responding to every E-Mail immediately sets false expectations for those who send you E-Mail. It may be valuable to set a time within your E-Mail systems or through policy on when people should use E-Mail, thus establishing some clear disciplines on using E-Mail effectively.

E-Mail contains the thoughts of those who write the e- mail. As I have studied it more, I have come to realize that E-Mail contains attitude, issues, requests and knowledge on the writer. By employing business intelligence, these thought forms, embedded in E-Mail, can be extracted to serve many uses from security to customer care to analytics.

Use attachments sparingly. If the recipient has no need to view the whole document or edit it anyway, just use the text of the document as part of your E-Mail body. Attachments can be very heavy and have the potential to send an E-Mail system crawling on its knees. Also make sure to have effective anti-virus so that the documents you send are not infected.

If you are the person initiating E-Mail contact with someone, do not forget to include your name, profession or organization where you work, or any other important information to identify yourself. You could have this information in the first few sentences of your E-Mail as an intro.

If you are just following up on an earlier conversation or contact and are not sure whether the other person will remember you, drop a few casual hints or bring up a reference to the earlier conversation.

If you are E-Mailing someone outside your organization, it helps to have a signature line that includes your full name and/ or telephone number with a link to a blog or website.

A meaningful subject line is an important prerequisite of any E-Mail. The recipient most likely has many E-Mails in his Inbox. He or she is going to scan the Subject line quickly to narrow down the list of E-Mails on which to take action or read. If you do not have a meaningful Subject line, the recipient may not read it or worse, may even trash it without reading.

Take a moment to see whether the Subject line conveys the essence of what is in the actual E-Mail body before hitting that "Send" button.

If you have a lot of action points to discuss about, try to spread them over a few separate E-Mails. If it is a very long E-Mail, recipients may only read partway and hit "reply" as soon as they have something to contribute. It is quite common for them to forget to keep reading. This is part of human nature.  Spreading them over a few E-Mails reduces that risk. Alternatively, you may inform the recipient first up that there a lot of action points and you need them to read through all of them before replying. You may also consider numbering them and presenting them in order of importance.