Writing an e-mail is part of the daily routine in today's business world. Email is a convenient, fast and effective medium of communication. However, as with business letters, formal and content-related rules also apply to business e-mails. It is also true for a university that e-mails are part of the correspondence and present the THM to the outside world in the same way as a letter.

The following information is intended to help you as an employee of THM in e-mail traffic.

More detailed information on this topic can be found in the Work aid "Data protection no. 1 - data protection-compliant handling of e-mails". The work aid "Data protection no. 1 - data protection-compliant handling of e-mails" is intended to provide guidance on professional, secure and data protection-compliant handling of electronic mail and to make everyday handling of e-mails easier.

The following elements belong in a professional email:

  •     A clearly recognizable sender,
  •     a meaningful subject line,
  •     a clearly written text,
  •     a reasonable greeting,
  •     proper sender information and
  •     carefully used file attachments.

The actual text of the e-mail should be structured in terms of content and appearance, which makes it easier to read. Write in short, clear sentences and break up your text with paragraphs and blank lines.

In this context, however, optically structured does not mean the use of HTML mails that enable design with font effects, colors and other highlights. The file size of HTML e-mails is significantly larger than that of text e-mails. In addition, some users use e-mail programmes that cannot display HTML e-mails correctly. It is therefore advisable to send text mails.

In the Thunderbird e-mail programme you can convert your e-mails to text e-mails as follows:

Open the Thunderbird dialog box Tools -> Account Settings and then in left panel on her THM account. Among Composing & Addressing disable the preference "Compose messages in HTML format"

text email