How to Send a Proper Email, Whoever You Are Writing To

The message is written. It has been rewritten twice. It is still in the drafts folder because you cannot decide whether “Hi” is too casual or “Dear” is too stiff, and the person receiving it is someone whose opinion of you matters. To send a proper email, give it one purpose, put that purpose in a specific subject line, greet the recipient in a register that matches your relationship, say what you want in the first two or three sentences, keep the body short, and close with a sign-off, a signature, and a proofread. The structure is the easy half. The part causing the hesitation is the register, and that depends on who is on the other end rather than on any single rule.

The six parts of a proper email

Guides on this topic disagree about almost nothing structural. Professional email format guides from MySignature, Overloop and Mailshake all describe the same fixed sequence in the same order: a subject line, a greeting, an opening line that states the purpose, a body carrying the supporting detail, and a closing with a sign-off and signature. That agreement is worth something. It means the shape of a proper email is settled, and you can stop treating it as a decision.

The subject line is the only part that has to compete for attention. The working guidance is to keep it under about 15 words and make it state the reason for the message, so the recipient can decide whether to open it now or come back to it later. “Question about Thursday’s deadline” does work in an inbox list that “Quick question” cannot do anywhere.

The greeting is where the register decision actually gets made, so it is covered in the next section. The one option that goes wrong for nearly every recipient is skipping it. A message that opens straight into its first sentence reads as abrupt, even when nothing about it was meant that way.

The opening line states why you are writing. The guidance from the Forbes Coaches Council is to put the purpose, the action required and the deadline in the first few lines, so the reader understands the point by the end of the first sentence. This is the part that feels wrong to write, because in a conversation you would warm up first. In an email you do not, and each message should carry one objective and one action you want taken.

The body carries the supporting detail and nothing else. Mailshake and EmailAnalytics both put the practical target at paragraphs of two to three sentences and a total under roughly 200 words. Bold, if you use it, is for a date or an action item — not for emphasis. Stick to a standard font at 11 or 12 point in black; the sources are unanimous that decorative formatting costs you more than it gains.

The closing is a sign-off and a signature. The sign-off changes with register. The signature does not: your name, your role, and a way to reach you, on every message.

The proofread is one deliberate pass before sending — typos, missing words, the attachment you have not attached, and whether the tone came out colder than you meant. It is the step people skip when they are already nervous about sending, which is exactly when it is worth doing.

Four kinds of email, and how “proper” changes across them

Every one of those six parts stays. What moves is the register — how formal the language is, how you address the person, and how you sign off. Guides from Indeed, Mailbutler and WriteMail describe three standard levels, and one recurring situation sits slightly outside them.

The formal email

This is the register for people you have no established relationship with: a new client, a supplier, an institution, a senior manager you have not worked with, an application you are submitting. The convention is “Dear Mr./Ms. [Last Name]”, no contractions, no slang, and a sign-off from the formal set — “Sincerely,” “Respectfully,” “Yours faithfully.”

What distinguishes it is that the formality is doing a job. It signals respect in a situation where you have no shared history to signal it with. It is not stiffness for its own sake, and it is the safe default when you cannot tell which level applies. Opening a notch more formal than feels natural costs almost nothing; the reverse is harder to recover from.

The semi-formal email

This is where most working email actually lives: existing colleagues, clients you already have a relationship with, partners you deal with regularly. The convention is “Hi [First Name]”, contractions allowed, plain professional language, and a sign-off like “Best regards” or “Thanks.”

Its distinguishing feature is that it is a balance rather than a compromise — respectful without being stiff. The reliable way to find the right level is to take it from the other person. Match the register of their last message to you, and adjust from there. Someone who signs off “Cheers, Tom” has told you what they expect back.

The informal internal email

This is the register for close teammates and people you work with daily: casual greetings, contractions, sometimes emojis, short and functional. It is real, it is common, and it is where new professionals most often misjudge.

The distinguishing feature is that it is earned rather than chosen. Informal register is what a relationship arrives at, not where it starts. Watching how your team writes to each other for a few weeks before adopting it is not timidity; it is how you find out what “normal” is in a place you have just joined.

The first-contact email

This one is defined by the recipient not knowing who you are — emailing a professor, a recruiter, someone whose work you follow, a hiring manager. It usually sits at the formal end, but it carries a requirement none of the other three have: you have to identify yourself, briefly, before you ask for anything.

Student-facing guidance from university writing centers and student success offices is specific about this. Send it from your institutional address rather than a personal one. Identify yourself by name, year, major, and the exact course and section, because that is what makes it possible for the recipient to actually help you. Give a concrete reason for writing. Keep it to one topic — a second, unrelated question belongs in a second email, and a message with two asks reliably gets one answer.

The details that actually get noticed

The mistakes named most often in email etiquette guides are not sophisticated ones. Text-speak in place of words. No sign-off. A message that never says who sent it. A subject line that describes nothing. A personal address with a joke in it, used for something that matters. Sounding as casual with a stranger as you would in a group chat.

None of these are moral failures, and none of them require you to become a more formal person. They are conventions, and they carry weight for a structural reason rather than a personal one: the recipient is reading quickly, in a queue, with no tone of voice and no face to read. The subject line, the greeting and the first sentence are all that is left to judge you on.

That is also why this is worth learning once rather than solving one message at a time. As student success guidance points out, professional email is a transferable skill, and practicing it now gives you an advantage when you start applying for jobs and corresponding with colleagues. If you notice the same hesitation recurring — the same rewriting, the same uncertainty about tone — that pattern is a habit rather than a series of unrelated emails, and it is possible to measure your communication habits instead of continuing to guess at them.

What sits underneath a well-written email

Read back through the four registers and notice how little of it is writing. Judging how much distance a relationship needs. Deciding whether a message should be an email at all. Getting the draft out of the folder. Those are judgments about people and about your own habits, made in a text box.

Communication covers the mechanics directly: lead with the main message, keep the subject line concise, send only to the people who need it, proofread, reply in good time. It also covers the decision that comes before all of that, which most email guides skip — whether this belongs in writing at all. Writing is right when the other person needs time to think, when there should be a record, or when information moves one way. A conversation is right when the subject is sensitive, complicated, a negotiation or a disagreement. Some of the messages people rewrite four times are messages that should have been a two-minute conversation.

Professional Behaviors answers the register question the guides leave half-open. Politeness, replying when you said you would, handling information that is not yours to forward, writing about a colleague as though they were in the room — these are workplace norms, not personality. Email is where most people meet them first, because a message to a client or a senior manager is often the first impression they get of you. Norms are rules, and rules can be learned in an afternoon.

Building Confidence is the one that gets you to press send. If the draft has been rewritten three times and is still sitting there, the problem is no longer format. The approach that works is deciding in advance when you will write it and when it goes out, getting past the first sentence rather than the whole message, and accepting the discomfort instead of waiting for it to lift. Sending imperfect emails is also how the judgment gets built — the reply that comes back is the evidence.

None of the three is something you either have or do not. The framework these come from counts twelve such skills, all of them treated as learnable, which is why a self-assessment is more useful here than another template: the Job Skills Test scores all twelve and will spot the gaps worth closing first, at no cost.

Some of the six parts are probably already automatic for you, and the hesitation is over one or two of them rather than the whole thing. That is worth noticing — it means you have been picking this up from the work around you rather than waiting for someone to teach it. You also looked the convention up instead of guessing, which is not what most people do with an email they are unsure about. The parts that landed awkwardly are simply the next ones to learn, and learning them asks nothing about who you are.

The stakes attached to a sent message rise quietly over a career. The recipients get more senior, the threads acquire longer memories, and more of what people conclude about your judgment reaches them in writing before it reaches them any other way. The habits are cheapest to build now, on messages nobody will remember. The only thing still missing is a sense of where you are starting from.

Before the next one you hesitate over

The Job Skills Test is a free self-assessment of the skills you use at work. You answer questions about how you actually operate day to day, and it scores you across all twelve — communication and professional behaviors among them — then shows which ones would repay attention soonest. It takes about seven minutes, on your own, and there is no rush about it. Take it before the next message you find yourself rewriting, and you will know whether what slows you down is the wording, the register, or the medium.

Take the skills test

Free to take, and about seven minutes of quiet attention.