Email tips which I thought were common knowledge.

Avoiding embarrassing forwards

Problem: You receive an email (say from a customer), you pass it along internally with a few comments and… you accidentally copy the author of the email with details they were not meant to read.

Solution: Instead of “Reply to all”, adding your team in Cc and removing the customer (the part a lot of people forget), forward the whole email and then add your comments. It’s much easier to avoid mistakes when you have to populate an empty To: box than when you have to edit an existing list of To's, Cc's and Bcc's.

Don’t send too soon

Problem: writing an email that’s not ready to be sent yet.

You need to write a detailed email which is not supposed to be sent just yet (for example because you are describing something you’re still working on). How do you make sure that you don’t send the email until the time is right?

Solution: Write it and save it as a draft but don’t enter anything in the To: box. Do this last.

Say no to ugly emails

Problem: You want your emails to look nice.

My emails routinely contain code or shell output, and as much I love Gmail, its abilities to format are pathetic, both from a user interaction standpoint (why do I need three clicks to indent text to the right?) and from a theme standpoint. For example:

In order to get this ugly rendition of code, I had to indent the snippet manually and then change its font. And it still looks terrible.

Solution: Use Markdown Here, a Chrome extension which not only allows you to format your code in Markdown but also uses some pretty nice CSS.

You only need a few backticks and, optionally, specify the language:

```java
public class SlidingWindowMap {
  public SlidingWindowMap(Set keys, int maxCount, long periodMs) {
    // ...
  }
  /**
   * @return a key that has been used less than `maxCount` times during the
   * past `periodMs` milliseconds or null if no such key exists.
   */
  public String getNextKey() {
    // Your brilliant Solution goes here
  }
}
```

Click the Markdown button and voilà:

Your turn now, what email tricks do you use which you think very few people know?