When Sending an Important Email, Add the Recipient Last
When you are busy drawing up an important e-mail, for example, a potential hiring manager, random sending it before it will be ready – is the easiest way to fail. Maybe there’s a clear spelling mistake — you could have sworn it wasn’t there before — or you forgot to attach your resume. Instead of continuing with your gay lifestyle, the manic process of follow-up letters now begins. “I apologize for that,” you write, before correcting the problem in writing.
Here’s an obvious tip to repeat now and for your common sense: Never start an important email by leaving the recipient’s email address on the “To” line. It’s all too easy to accidentally hit the Send button and find yourself spiraling after you’ve sent an email that you really don’t want to send. When replying to an email, I usually immediately delete the recipient’s email address to avoid this altogether, which is usually helpful advice here.
Our Vitals editor, Beth, puts the email address on the first line of the body. “That way I can cut and paste when I’m ready and I won’t be using the topic field,” she said. “I used to just put an x at the end of the address ([email protected]), but Gmail doesn’t like letting you do that.”
Or, you can do what the Verge feature editor, Kevin Nguyen, admits, to preserve the quality of your emails. “I compose all my emails in a word processor because I’m always afraid that I will accidentally hit Submit too early,” he tweeted . If that seems like too much of an effort, why not use one of these handy yet polite email response templates instead?