As you know, email is an integral part of most businesses today. It's essential, for communicating with customers, prospects, suppliers, vendors, and business associates.

In fact, email is so much a part of your own day, that you probably don't put much thought into using it. You open your email program, read your mail, respond or create a new email, hit send, and blithely assume your email will be delivered almost instantaneously to the intended recipients.

Usually, that's what happens. But sometimes the email doesn't get through. Sometimes it has bad typos or partial sentences omitted. Sometimes it goes to the wrong person. And, OOPS! Once in a while something you absolutely don't want a specific person to see winds up in that person's inbox.

While there's no way to avoid all problems with email, there's a lot you can do to prevent the most significant problems. Here are several important tips.

Double check the "to" email address before you hit send. One of the leading causes of bounced email (email that “bounces” back and doesn’t get sent), is incorrect email address. Often the problem is something simple, like a letter being reversed in the email address, or the wrong domain being used (.com instead of .org, for instance.). If your email program automatically tries to finish the "to" line based on the first couple of letters you type in, you might you might accidentally send your email to Jonathan Small when you meant it to go to Jonathan Smith. So, read what appears in the "to" line before you hit send.

Fill in the subject line. If you don't fill in the subject line the email may look like spam and never get opened. That's especially true if your email address isn't well-known to the person to whom you're sending mail.

Spell the words in your subject line (and the body of your text) correctly. Use a spell checker if you must. Typos and misspelled words make you look ignorant or sloppy. That’s particularly bad if you’re answering an ad for a job.

Learn to use the blind copy feature in email. If you have information that’s public and you want to distribute it at one time to a lot of people, put the multiple names in the blind copy field, not the copy to field. That will let each person on your list see the email without letting the rest of the list have access to all email address you copied the email to.

Check to see you’ve actually attached the attachment you say you are including. Forgetting to do insert the attachment is pretty common , but if the email is important, you want to be sure it all gets to the recipient at one time.

Be sure you have deleted text that’s not meant for the recipient’s eyes. When you're forwarding email that someone sent to you, you need to be sure to scan all the way down to the bottom of the email to be sure all comments you don't want the recipient to see have been deleted. Failure to do so can have some serious negative consequences.

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