Email tip: Don't fill in the "To" section first

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When writing sensitive emails to clients or even to friends, don’t fill the “to” section in first. You don’t want to accidentally send a half written or draft email do you? Leave that field blank until it’s ready to send. Alternatively, try writing email in a text editor and then pasting the final draft into your email client when it’s ready.

This may sound trivial, but it only takes one accident to lose a valuable client to email confusion.

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  • Good tip.
    And I also removed the “Reply All” Button from my toolbar since I accidentally replied to all once when I didn’t even realize the original mail was sent to several people.

  • Doing this very often. Have read it a few years back. Also tagged as a “great tip”. But if this is just such a great tip. Why the “to” field isn’t below the e-mail text field?

    Anyway. 🙂

  • Great tip. Another thing I do as well is write out everything that I’m thinking, and then go back and condense. It used to be time consuming, but now I’ve got it down to an art. My emails are shorter, clearer and much more effective.

    • Yeah me too. I waffle like mad so this method saves me a lot of editing… I had to do it with this comment.

  • I have been using this method for years. Here’s another related one that my company learned the hard way: Disable auto-complete of names. Sometimes, whilst writing an email in a hurry, you can send to the entirely wrong client (who has a similar name).

  • Great Tip! I need to start doing this. So many times I have typed an email, hit send and thought, “Did I just send that to the right person?” Putting the email in last is a good way to be sure you are sending the COMPLETED message to the right people.

    Thanks!!!

  • Autocomplete is always scary.

    I always forget to write a header or I send halfcomplete emails. So lately I’ve started doing this too

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