You get an error today and vaguely remember getting the same error last year and emailed about it? You want to summarize a problem and its solution out of an email thread? How do you quickly gather your past achievements to write a year-end review? Workplace emails should be turned into an efficient knowledge base and an archive of personal achievements. But I find that some of my coworkers and friends are not using email messages as efficiently as they should be. So, read these tips and see if they can help you.

1. Mail folders should be lean by keeping duplicate information to the minimum. After replying to an email, delete the message from the Inbox so the Inbox becomes lean. Go to the Sent folder and delete earlier messages in this same thread if their content is part of the email you already replied to, so the Sent folder is also lean.

2. Replying to a message won't include the attachments in that message. If the attachments are useful, keep the message in Inbox even if you already replied to it. Or save the attachments out of the message to your hard drive (and name it meaningfully) and delete the message after you reply.

3. An email thread often forks, i.e. John and Jack both reply to the thread but neither reply message contains all the content of earlier messages. If their arguments are on exactly the same point, you may manually merge them in one reply email (if you reply) and delete both their replies. If not, and you reply to one of them (so you delete the one you reply to), remember to keep the other in Inbox.

4. Some companies have the policy of limiting the total size of email folders. You can occasionally sort emails by size and review the biggest messages, possibly due to multiple huge attachments. Open the message and remove (or save to hard drive and remove) the attachments but keep the message (if it's worth keeping), which immediately becomes much smaller.

5. Some companies delete messages older than a few years. If a message is predicted to be useful beyond that time limit, save it to your hard drive, or copy all text (^A, ^C) and paste (^V) into a text document, in plain text if no need of various fonts, otherwise in rich format. Moving it to the Archive folder may or may not bypass the deletion rule, depending on the policy.

6. (Some of my coworkers are really bad at this!) Emails become the most useful when you search for old work, turning Microsoft Outlook or whatever email software you use into a knowledge base. The search bar is at the very top of Outlook of modern versions. Use double quotes for an exact match. Once you find messages matching the keyword(s), open one, press F4 and find the keyword in the message. If you leave the message in the preview pane, the keyword remains highlighted with light yellow background (which is one reason it's not a good idea to highlight critical text in yellow when you write an email).

7. Outlook can support searching text in attachments. But searching in images, either embedded or in an attachment, is not nearly as good. This is why it's important you write or paste text and do not just paste a screen image; alas, too many users in this world like to do that, oblivious to the fact that we IT support people have to manually type their error message in order to search for a solution, not to mention the problem in searching emails in the future! Sometimes, when I reply to a user that sent me a screen shot of an error (with no text of the error), I manually type the critical part of it just so it becomes searchable.

8. Sometimes you get an email in plain text, especially from a job on a server. Plain text does not allow font changes, and when replied to, may widen line gaps, making a message appear more and more sparse if replied to multiple times. Unless it's a quick, simple reply, change the format to HTML or Rich Text when you forward or reply so you or your coworker can highlight certain words.

9. Short attention span of this age has crept into the workplace. For faster and easier digest of your email, highlight critical words by changing text to bold (not italic or underlined) for visual effect, or by changing text color, or adding background color. (But yellow background is not ideal as an searched-and-found message would also highlight the search keywords this way when viewed in the preview pane.) Remember, highlighting too much in a message is almost always useless.

10. Text of command output, programming code, a SQL execution plan, or any text in table-like format should use a fixed width font. It's very common to see people paste this kind of text that would look much better if the lines were vertically aligned. As an IT professional, I change my default font to fixed width Courier New, but many people leave it as Calibri, or Aptos (the new default), which is fine. (Sometimes I have the urge to, and even actually do, change a very friendly coworker's text by formatting part of his/her text when I reply.) Equally common is long lines with plenty of blank spaces in the middle for all lines, as in the output of a SQL without setting column width first (e.g. "col username for a30" in Oracle SQL*Plus). You can easily select the spaces vertically by pressing Alt and select, and delete.

11. I may be the only one or one of very few people in the IT industry that consider black text on white or light color background easier to read than white text on black background. Many years ago, I created this image on my (obscure) personal website:

Eye strain test

c:\ C:\WINDOWS\System32\cmd.exe	c:\ C:\WINDOWS\System32\cmd.exe
D:\>od -x D:\oracle\product\11.2.0\db_1\bin\sqlplus.exe|head -5 0000000 5a4d 0090 0003 0000 0004 0000 ffff 0000 0000020 00b8 0000 0000 0000 0040 0000 0000 0000 0000040 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000060 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 00f8 0000 0000100 1f0e 0eba b400 cd09 b821 4c01 21cd 6854	D:\>od -x D:\oracle\product\11.2.0\db_1\bin\sqlplus.exe|head -5 0000000 5a4d 0090 0003 0000 0004 0000 ffff 0000 0000020 00b8 0000 0000 0000 0040 0000 0000 0000 0000040 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000060 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 00f8 0000 0000100 1f0e 0eba b400 cd09 b821 4c01 21cd 6854

I hope most people agree that the text in the right pane is easier to read. So, when writing an email, if you do have text or "text" in an image, consider black text on white or light color background instead of the other way around.

12. When your manager asks you to summarize what you have done, or when you write your year-end review, the Sent folder will be your primary information repository, if you frequently contribute to problem solving and diligently trim your mail folders, because Inbox is incomplete in content and Delete is purged aggressively by IT. In short, when you search for old work you did, review the Sent folder messages first.

The tips above try to achieve three goals: keep email folders lean, use emails as knowledge base or work repository, and make emails easy to read. The first goal requires you to keep deleting messages with duplicate content, which may not be practical during busy times so do it as much as you can. The second goal requires that everyone, not just you, keep work-related information as text, not "text" inside an image or a video. The third advocates for legibility such as vertical alignment of certain text. Hope these tips are helpful to anybody working in a corporate environment.

March 2026

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