This is a guest post from Russ Olsen, who blogs at Technology as if People Matter. I must admit that I’ve forgotten how I first came across his blog, but when I did, I pretty quickly emailed him and asked if he’d be interested in writing for Geek Etiquette. Now I’m happy to [...]

I’m at BarCampBlock so there’s going to be a bit of a change in format here while I liveblog Michael Schwern’s talk, “Geek to Geek: how we fail, how to fix it.”
What’s this talk about?

We’re good at computer science and bad at people

We have certain patterns of failure and certain ways to fix those

Schwern is [...]

Avron writes:

I had a thought about how best to get friends/family/colleagues to change the email address they use for you.
* Do you simply do a mass email from the new account to everyone (using the BCC field of course) so they can simply add the new address?
* Do you send from the old so it’s [...]

There’s a thread going on the London Perl Mongers mailing list, wherein one poster thoughtlessly addressed his email to “Gentlemen” and got called on it.
It’s easy to do, and there’s no reason not to when you know that the group you’re talking to are all men. But what if you don’t know? What [...]

Try this: when writing an email in a possibly inflammatory situation, save it as a draft for an hour and review it before hitting “send”.
What’s a possibly inflammatory situation?

You are going to write something with which the recipient will probably disagree.

You’re expressing a strongly felt opinion, even if asked for it.

You’re writing to someone two [...]

OK, OK, I’ll write about mobile phone etiquette! I guess by the number of people who’ve suggested it, it must be a matter of supreme importance. I wouldn’t have supposed that it was something that applied particularly to geeks, though; in my experience, it’s non-technical management and sales people who are most glued [...]

Last time I talked about email, I covered greetings. This time, it’s the other end of the message: sig files.
Used to be the rule was 4 lines of 72 columns, delimited by two hyphens, a space, and a newline. Easy peasy. I’m old-school enough that I still do that, but not everyone [...]

Used to be that business letters were simple. You (or your secretary) typed them on your manual typewriter, beginning “Dear Sir,” and followed a simple formula as laid out in various handbooks of business communications.
Email’s less formal, we all know that. And in completely informal situations, we all know how to use it [...]