#thing14email

[researcheryearone]

Thing 14: Email

Workshop 14 focuses on the use of emails. I use email everyday and therefore quite an experienced email user. Emails are essential for everyday life as in order to sign up to subscription service, buy products online or just to communicate to individuals requires that you own an emails address. Emails are also essential for work, as this is the primary way of communication within organisations and between organisations (even more so in covid times). As you can tell I am therefore a heavy email user and as a result I found most of this workshop less useful as it was providing fairly basic information.

The workshop had three parts, the first part detailed the basic features of emails, the second part gave suggestions of how to organise your emails and third part provided instruction to write a blog.

The first part focuses mostly on the basics of emails, explaining the uses of the message header, message body, attachments section, reply settings and finally the junk and spam sections. Which I did not find very useful as this was very basic information which regular users of email will be well accustomed to. However, part one that is very useful is what to do when sending the same email to multiple people as there three different ways to do this. This was very useful as many people do not realise there is different was to send emails to multiple people and in-particular that there is a difference between Cc and Bc.

There are three primary ways to send an email to multiple people.

1) The first way is to type all the relevant email addresses into the ‘to’ bar at the top of the email. This is used when all the recipients are the primary focus.  An example of this could be sending out an agenda for a team meeting. 

2) A second way is to use the Cc function. This used when you want to include the email address of an individual/organisation which is not the primary recipient. An example of this could be when two colleagues set up a meeting to discuss a potential new project but want to include their managers so they are kept up to date with the progress. The managers would then be put in the Cc section as they are not the primary target of the email. 

3) Third way is to use the Bc section. This is used when you do not want email recipients to see each other email addresses. A common example of this is when sending out survey. Everyone's email will be put into the Bc section as to protect their confidentiality. Alternatively a staff or school newsletter may also use this function. 

The second part of the workshop focuses on organising your emails using folders. one suggestion that is made is to organise emails into the following folders:

Inbox (newly arrived emails which haven’t been sorted yet)

Needs action today

Needs action this week

Needs action this month/quarter

FYI (for information).

I had not previously not thought of organising my emails in this way as I normally sort me emails by either person or topic depending on which one is most relevant. Whilst I will continue to organise emails in my way, I will definitely consider implementing this suggested system into my existing system for bigger projects.