Write a perfect email

It's worthwhile thinking about how to write good emails, especially when you have a lot to write. I was feeling chuffed that a lot of the advice here was already stuff I'd kind of worked out. Here's the rules according to Wired: "Brevity ... You may have lots of information to share, but in email you are in a long list of others competing for your recipient’s attention. Keeping it brief is a sign of respect
Context ... If I don’t know you by name, tell me how you came to contact me. We talked about mixers at a podcasting meetup. You saw a panel I was on last year.... have a subject line. One that makes sense...
Something to act on. Make your requests clear. ... You should set them apart from the rest of the message by paring them down to one sentence, with white space before and after ... if you can frame the question such that a lengthy answer isn’t required, you’re apt to get a quicker response.
A deadline. There comes a time when the response you seek is no longer useful. If you know when that is, tell your recipient. This can be a good way both to prompt a speedy turnaround, and to let people off the hook in the long term."

And while we're on the subject, I reckon this one deserves further thought: "The Problem
E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.
The Solution Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.
five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple."

Write a perfect email / Wired How To's