How to send a personal email | Hacker News Reader

How to send a personal email

sethgodin.typepad.com

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I'm trying to figure out who the target audience is for this blog post.

I get the feeling it's "people who email Seth Godin"...

Like almost all of his other posts, this is directed towards marketers.

No smugness intended.

This just has to be mentionned:

My Seth Godin decline letter. Thoughts?, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398293

Funny, that's exactly the article I was thinking about as I read this.

The impersonal auto-response link above pretty badly contradicts the advice given here. I wonder if Seth Godin wrote the current post as "lessons learned" or just didn't feel like following his own best practices. (Physician, heal thyself.)

Did Seth just realize he wasn't the only one receiving all those personal emails directly from Barack Obama?

Not necessarily on topic, but: when sending personal emails (not even business-personal emails, but actual personal emails between friends&family) do you include a salutation?

Dear Noah,

No.

Thanks,

Kirubakaran.

PS: Hope you had a merry Christmas or a happy New Year or both. If not, hang in there buddy!

yes, but not always. usually it's something informal 'yo'.

a good idea, regardless of salutations, is to gently focus your readers into your email. would you like it if someone immediately rushed into their idea? it'd be a little jarring.

on the other hand, whatever. for short messages why clog the signal?

I almost always include something very informal (Hi <name>,) in an initial email (or in my first reply of a thread) but often leave it out in later replies. I consider it friendly, but once you start taking the email to bits and reply to individual sentences or paragraphs, there really isn't much point. You're already mid-conversation, no need to say hi again.

Ditto. I actually like it when people take an extra couple of seconds to write "Hi <name>," at the beginning of an email conversation. I like it better than when people start off with just "<name>," which I personally find slightly rude, it's like how a teacher or some other authority figure would start off a conversation where they expect they will be telling you off or something. "John, you didn't do your homework did you?"

I don't find it so rude as to really be bothered by it or feel like I have to mention it, but rude enough that I never do it myself.

Sometimes I'll use one if it's someone I don't talk to regularly, but if it's someone I know I don't. I have a similar policy with endings. If I'm asking for something, I'll use "thanks" because it seems polite. If I'm apologizing or being formal in some way, I'll often use "sincerely" or something similar.

Otherwise, what I do depends on how often I email them and how well they know me. If they don't know me or I don't often email them, then I'll close with just a dash and my name, in order to make it clear who I am and build an association. If they already know me well and we email fairly regularly, I won't use my name ("Thanks-\nJeb" becomes "Thanks!"), because it just adds noise.

(These aren't hard rules, of course.)

I tend to start with 'Howdy'. That is also how I usually answer the phone (Howdy, this is James...). Some times I insert the persons name afterwards, or some times I skip the Howdy and just put their name in. It just depends on who I am contacting and why.

> "5. Don't send HTML or pictures. Personal email doesn't, why are you?"

uh. shouldn't you just do what you normally do? just like the "keep your salutation normal and un-merged" rules?

i personally prefer text only emails, though attachments are fine. i appreciate a client that permits me to "click on" htp://... to automatically see the page rather than copy paste (pine, gmail).

when i set up meetings with people i've never met in person before i often include a picture of myself. i sprinkle that same picture around the internet. maybe interacting with strangers isn't personal, but then the whole point of the picture is to make things more open, friendly and personable.

Both business and personal emails are read by people, not machines, so write in the same style. Just keep LOL & C U L8r 4 SMS.

i don't agree with him

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