Zach Goldberg's Recommendations
In his book the Startup CTO's Handbook, Zach Goldberg gives his advice on how to best use email. Rather than trying to summarize his advice, I will simply quote it here. This is a direct copy from his open-source book, which can be found in his GitHub repository here.
Pretty much anyone you interact with nowadays has either been using email for twenty-five years, or since they were in early grade school, so of course this means they know how to use it effectively, right? Unfortunately, effective use of email at work is not necessarily common sense. So, it comes to you to help encourage best practices. Here is some general advice for using email effectively:
Don't let email become your job.
Rather than having email open all day or monitoring it continuously, check email a fixed times each day.
Disable email notifications on your phone. Though this one in particular may seem blasphemous, I encourage you to try it. Not only does it significantly reduce the number of notifications you receive, but you'll find yourself building a new habit of proactively checking email when you're ready to engage. This makes email an intentional activity instead of a continual background nuisance.
Get to inbox zero every day.
Invest time in learning your email tool or use optional email assistant add-ons/plugins that help sort and triage email so that, by the end of the day, every day, you'll have zero unread emails.
Zeroing your inbox doesn't mean acting on or responding to every email. If you're using email as a to-do list, that's fine (though it's not ideal see Meetings and Time Management, page 28, for better to-do list alternatives); just make sure to triage your email to-do list out of your core inbox so that you won't confuse it with untriaged emails.
Don't problem-solve in email.
Email is a suboptimal medium for having an in-depth discussion, especially when more than two people are involved. Group emails are best used for coordination and overcommunication, not problem-solving.
Understand that email tends to lack nuance and tone of voice, which makes intent easy to misconstrue.
The temptation to write or participate in a nuanced group email thread is a good indicator that a synchronous conversation is a better forum for addressing the topic at hand. A fifteen-minute discussion can often resolve what an email thread of twenty messages will only scratch the surface of.
The act of writing down one's thoughts is often a very productive exercise, but email is not a great way to facilitate and capture that written brainstorming process. Encourage your team to instead write memos in a wiki to facilitate deep thinking.
Don't rely on email for long or in-depth communication.
In general, email is a poor medium for long-form content. Long memos are better put into internal wikis or documentation that can be commented on, updated, and easily referenced in the future.
Keep emails relatively short ideally, bulleted for key ideas.
Don't hesitate to use basic formatting such as bold or highlighting for requests/action items.
Be mindful of your audience.
Engineers in general prefer to be writing code instead of reading/answering email. Ask yourself if an email is really the right way to communicate with your audience. In general, the best method of communication with somebody is their preferred method, not yours.
It's very easy to leave coworkers off an email thread, either intentionally in an effort not to flood inboxes, or as an innocent mistake. If you're sitting there thinking about which people to add to/remove from an email thread, that's a good sign email is the wrong forum to begin with.