Email Etiquette | Renaud Detry

Threading

Always begin a new thread when addressing a new topic. In other words, never begin a new email discussion by reply-all to a previous, unrelated email.

Interleaved Posting

Use interleaved posting when responding to an email longer than a few lines.

Quoting Previous Messages

Interleaving is only practical if your e-mail client can properly quote the message you’re responding to.

Email Format

Quoting mechanisms are dependent on the e-mail format you’re using, i.e., whether you’re using plain text e-mail or HTML e-mail. (HTML email is occasionally referred to as rich-text email.)

Make sure you understand the distinction between plain-text email and HTML email. To confirm that you’ve understood it well, find out how you can make your email client display the data contained in an email (often referred to as raw message or message source) and inspect a variety of plain-text and HTML emails you’ve received or sent:

Thunderbird Mac: select a message, then go to View > Message Source
Apple Mail: select a message, then go to View > Message > Raw Source
Outlook Mac: ctrl-click a message then View Source
(If you figure out how to view a message’s source in another client, add a line here.)

Email clients allow you to configure the format you wish to use for new email or for responding to emails you’ve received. I highly recommend that you configure your client to always compose plain-text emails. Go to your client settings and look for a section named Compose or similar.

Make sure that your email client is configured to display plain-text emails with a monospace font such as Courier (see your client’s display or font settings).

Note for Thunderbolt users: Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Thunderbird’s email composer cannot be configured to restrict its display format to plain text, even when it’s configured to send messages as plain text. You’re still allowed to use HTML formatting in the editor, and, if you’ve configured the client to send emails as plain text, formatting is stripped when your message is sent (converting colored text quotes to > prefixing in the process). Be mindful of that when writing messages.

To bypass the annoyances of in-client email editing, see the withExEditor plugin for Firefox or Chrome, that allows one to use Vim (or any other text editor) in the Outlook Web App of the university’s Exchange server. Muttator may provide a similar solution for Thunderbird, see its plugin page on Thunderbird’s website.

Quoting in Plain Text Email

The greater-than sign > is almost universally used as a line-prefix to indicate quoting in plain-text email. This is the standard that our lab follows. If you’re using plain-text email, use an email client that supports quoting with >. Examples are Thunderbird and Apple Mail. At the time of this writing, Microsoft Outlook for Mac and the Outlook Web App only support indented plain-text quoting (i.e., using indentation instead of >), which is unacceptable. I don’t have access to the Windows version of Outlook, but I suspect it isn’t any better. I suggest installing Thunderbird instead. It can be easily configured to work with KU Leuven’s Exchange server:

Go to https://admin.kuleuven.be/icts/english/services/email/index,
Scroll to Configuration guidelines for mail clients and devices,
Choose either for students (Microsoft Cloud) and staff members who migrated to the Cloud or for staff (classic Exchange environment),
Click on IMAP.

Quoting in HTML Email

For this course, we strongly advise against HTML email.

Trimming

Think carefully about trimming. In doubt, do not trim.