Recommended Email Practices
The following are some recommended email practices for committee correspondence. These are not intended to be formal rules or requirements, but simply good practices to help keep communication transparent, efficient and easy to follow.
Keep Everyone in the Thread
When replying to an existing committee or project email, Reply All should generally be the default. This ensures that everyone already involved in the discussion continues to receive the correspondence and has the same context.
If someone no longer needs to be included, it is helpful to make this explicit rather than silently removing them from the thread. For example:
[Removing XYZ from the thread as the remainder is committee discussion]
This makes it clear to the other recipients that the change was intentional.
Make It Clear When Adding Someone
If a new person or group is added to an existing email thread, mention this at the beginning of the email. For example:
[Adding XYZ to the thread for visibility]
This ensures everyone is aware that the audience for the conversation has changed and that previous correspondence may now be visible to additional recipients.
Start a New Thread for a New Topic
If a conversation moves onto a substantially different issue, start a new email thread with an appropriate subject line rather than continuing an unrelated discussion.
This is particularly useful when dealing with matters that may need to be referred back to later, such as approvals of resident requests, renovations, maintenance matters or other committee decisions.
Keeping separate matters in separate threads makes it much easier to:
- search for correspondence later;
- understand the history of a particular matter;
- identify decisions and approvals; and
- reduce the chance of a request or action being overlooked within a long, unrelated conversation.
This has been an issue in the past where multiple resident requests were combined into the same email threads, making individual matters difficult to track.
General Principle
These practices are suggestions rather than requirements. The aim is simply to make committee correspondence as transparent, organised and efficient as possible, while ensuring everyone who needs to be informed remains appropriately included.