I prefer emails over traditional letters (or txt msgs, or twitter or IM), and sometimes I feel in a minority for doing so. For example, my church leaders request people don’t send emails, preferring letters or face-to-face meetings.

Happily, I’m not alone in favouring emails: is a short blog post from the CEO of an American Publishing company that made me nod and laugh.

But I think we’re both implying emails that follow the standard etiquette. I’m offline right now so I can’t link to any well-written summaries of this. But my list would include:

• being aware that things can be taken the wrong way, as there’s no tone or body language — so, use emoticons or other ways to make sure people know you’re making a joke, teasing them or being ironic
• writing when calm, not angry or upset
• where there are many different points, use interleaving for your response, leaving a blank line before and after
• for threads about only a few points, respect the top- or bottom-posting before you
• writing in normal sentence case, not in ALL CAPITALS
• using a subject line that does summarise the email — and change it if you’re starting a significantly new idea
• using BCC to send something to me and to a large list of other people, to keep my address private

So, if you are writing to complain about something that upset you, then bashing out a revengeful note is definitely off-limits. It’s a sad commentary on the state of the Christians in our churches if they get enough of these to comment publicly that emails are a bad idea.

On a related note, I’ve just read about some email pages that can help email recipients quickly help emailers with poor etiquette:

• Thanks, No turns down unwanted email
• five sentences explains why his email messages are so short
• BCC please asks that bulk senders use the BCC field to hide your address

Maggi Dawn writes in a post called “Facebook. Tried it, didn’t like it.”:

Honestly, I have a life already. You wanna say something? Just send me an email or ring me up like you did before.

She’s definitely not the only one saying this. So I’m not going to get started with it either, and I’ll stick to the current options …