When you receive an email with multiple recipients and use the Reply All action, the arrangement of email recipients in the reply message may not align with the conversation intent.
Suppose Person A sends an email with you in the To field and Persons B and C in the Cc field. When you Reply All, Person A will be in the To field and B and C in the Cc field. However, what if your message primarily addresses Person C or even Persons A and C together?
Or, imagine that Person A introduced you to Person B, putting both of you in the To field. Your Reply All will write to Person A and copy Person B. What do you do when you’re ready to transition Person A out of the conversation.
Client Notes
Last week, I struggled to get Peter’s Sonos system to work with his Apple Music library. I hope to resolve this soon. Meanwhile, I coached Marjorie and Leigh on retiring old email addresses, and simplified Juli’s computing experience with some hot tips.
Email Etiquette
When composing email, whether as a new message or a reply, it’s a good idea to place email recipients in appropriate headers. For example, a best practice is to place the primary target(s) of your message in the To field and Cc only those need to be aware of the communication.
When you Reply All on an email that was sent to a bunch of people, the sender becomes the primary recipient (To) and everyone else ends up in Cc. However, consider whom you actually want to address in your message. Another best practice is to remove unnecessary recipients and move individuals among the To or Cc fields based on their role in the conversation.
This B12 article on email etiquette provides more information on this important subject. It explains the value of differentiating among To, Cc, and Bcc. The latter is a good place to move recipients whom you are transitioning out of a conversation and want to share an awareness of this change.
Drag Email Recipients
In Mail on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, you can rearrange email recipients by dragging them. On Mac, you can multi-select contiguous recipients in a specific header field. This also works on mobile devices when using an external keyboard and/or mouse.
To do so, click and drag to select multiple recipients, or hold Shift and either click recipients or use the arrow keys to move the cursor. This follows the methods described in Multi-Select + Act and Natural Selection. (Noncontiguous selection is not possible.)
Then, simply drag the one or more selected recipients to the desired header field. With a mouse or trackpad, click and drag. On a touchscreen, touch them with your finger, move to the destination, and release.
I encourage you to maintain good etiquette in your email interactions. Be conscious of who needs a particular message in their inbox and courteous to move or remove email recipients as appropriate.
Feel free to share additional email best practices in the comments…
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