People are constantly getting themselves into trouble because they don’t put specific dates in emails. People have shown up on the wrong date for interviews and missed dinners and parties because they relied on words like ‘today’ or ‘tomorrow’ instead of specific dates. Not using a specific date can lead to a lot of problems. Think about this:

I. Emails are often delayed. ISPs (internet service providers) go down all the time. It is not unusual for an email to be received on the day after it was sent. In other words, if you send an email on May 3 that says: “The meeting will be tomorrow at 3PM”, what happens if your message isn’t received until the morning of May 4?
2. People don’t always read emails as soon as they arrive and don’t check the date when they were sent.
3. Using days of the week instead of specific dates can be confusing. Suppose you received an email on Tuesday, April 3 saying: “Our meeting is at 5PM next Thursday.” When is ‘next Thursday’? A lot of people would imagine that April 5 is ‘this Thursday’ and April 12 is ‘next Thursday’. However, that isn’t the way the dictionary defines ‘next’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘next’ means ‘immediately after’, so the next Thursday after Tuesday, April 3 is Thursday, April 5, not April 12.

All these problems and many more can be avoided by including specific dates in your emails. Don’t leave people wondering as to what date you are talking about. In the business world, that makes you look unprofessional and careless.  People sometimes get mad at me because I ask for specific dates when I get emails in which the date is unclear. I am writing this article now because that happened to me twice this month. A repairman sent me an email yesterday asking if he could come over to my house ‘the day after tomorrow’. I wrote him back and asked for a specific date, and he got mad at me!
Remember this….There are 365 todays in a year. There are 365 tomorrows. There are 52 Wednesdays. But there is only one April 11. Dates prevent confusion.

It is too bad that colleges in the United States don’t teach students how to write business letters. I majored in business administration in college, and this subject never came up.  Corporations generally don’t give any instructions to their employees about this either. I know business students at Cal who tell me that they still don’t teach this. In many foreign countries, all business students are required to learn how to write an email and a business letter.

OTHER COMMON EMAIL MISTAKES.
1. Forgetting to fill in the subject line. If you forget to include a subject line, your email may get ignored or get moved to your spam file and never be seen.2. A subject line that says nothing. If your subject line is vague or uninformative, how will you or the recipient find it later? Recently, a relative of mine sent me an email saying that he would be in San Francisco for a few days. The subject line in his email was ‘Travel’. How will I find that if I search my emails later?3. Not changing a bad subject line when replying or forwarding an email.
4. Forwarding an email to someone with an attachment when you don’t know the source of the attachment. This is how people get malware, spyware, and viruses in their computers.5. Sending an email to everyone on your mailing list. If you ever get an email that advises you to forward it ‘to everyone you know’, it is a scam. There is no message that you should forward to everyone you know.6. Replying to an email without checking to see who is on the carbon copy list. That can lead to some very embarrassing situations.
7. Not reporting spam. When you get a spam email, click the spam button. If you don’t report spam, you will get more spam.

By the 1970s, western Europe had fully recovered from World War 2, and their economies were growing rapidly. Before World War 2, people all over Europe were heating their homes and businesses with coal, but coal was being phased out in favor of natural gas. In 1980, Russia proposed building a 3,500 mile long pipeline to West Germany from Siberia, where Russia had vast reserves of natural gas. The Russians were offering to sell natural gas to western Europe at a bargain price. This project alarmed President Reagan. Reagan pointed out that Russia had always had authoritarian governments, and because of that, Reagan said, the Soviet Union would always regard countries like France and West Germany as enemies. Reagan said that over time, as industrialized democracies in western Europe became more and more dependent on Russian gas for their economic survival, someday the Russians would be in a position to use their natural gas as a weapon of blackmail or extortion. Of course, the Russians promised that they would never do that. Reagan imposed sanctions on the project to try to stop the pipeline’s construction, but greed carried the day. The Russians had powerful allies in this project. Europeans wanted the cheap natural gas the Russians were offering to sell them and big U.S. oil companies, which stood to make huge profits on the project, lobbied Congress to override Reagan’s sanctions, which Congress did, and the pipelines were built. Today, Vladimir Putin receives over $200 million a day from western Europe from natural gas sales alone. He gets much more from oil sales. If western Europe was not now dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, they would have cut off their imports of it as soon as Putin invaded Ukraine. The economy of Russia would have collapsed, and the war would have come to a quick end. Reagan got this one right.

Thomas Jefferson predicted that absolute monarchs and dictators would always regard a successful democracy anywhere in the world as a threat, no matter what the democracy did. That’s because people living under a dictator will always be thinking: “Why can’t we have the kind of government and the freedom that those people over there have?” Jefferson lived to see his prediction come true. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were widely read in Europe and directly led to several revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution. Jefferson correctly explained why someone like Vladimir Putin will always view countries like Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden as threats. It isn’t because these countries are in NATO. Sweden isn’t in NATO. It isn’t because they are in the EU. Britain isn’t in the European Union. It is because these countries have democratic governments and despite Putin’s best efforts, there are people all over Russia who know that and who would like to have that kind of government themselves. Jefferson got this one right.