Email is now a part of everyday life for almost everyone. Here at Black Owl, we want to equip you with useful information, guides, and links to help you make the most of the facilities and functions that email can offer. If you'd like us to go into further detail on any of these articles, please get in touch with us. For further email support you can either contact your email provider, or raise a ticket with Black Owl Support by emailing support@blackowl.co.uk*.
* please be aware that if we are not your email provider, we may be unable to help with your query.
These three common functions of email that are available on email platforms and email applications (clients). The three functions are explained in more detail below:
Reply all
This option is often the default 'reply' option on most email platforms and clients. Reply all can be useful in some cases where you want to keep everyone in an email thread up-to-date. That said, the flip side of that argument is that reply all can be dangerous as it will reply to everyone in that email thread.
To give an example, if you had an email from alice@example.com, with bob@example.com, chris@example.com, and dave@example.com in the 'To' field, and enid@example.com in the 'CC' field - hitting reply all would reply to all five people (Alice, Bob, Chris, Dave, and Enid).
When using 'reply all', care should be taken to as not to flood the inbox of others in the email conversation.
Reply
This option is used to reply only to the sender of the email. This can be incredibly useful when an email chain has a large number of recipients in the 'To' and/or 'CC' fields as it will send an email back to only the sender of that email message.
The flip side to this argument is that if everyone in the email thread needs an update - hitting reply will exclude them from the reply. This option does, however, stop you from accidentally flooding inboxes of other people.
If an email has been sent from bob@example.com, with alice@example.com and chris@example.com in the CC field, hitting 'reply' will reply only to bob@example.com.
Forward
This option is used to send a copy of the email (and the rest of the email thread - be careful!) to another recipient. This can be useful when you might want to send a copy of an order confirmation (for example) to a family member or a finance manager at work.
For example, if you received an email from chris@example.com and wanted to give a copy of the email to dave@example.com to look at, you may choose to forward the email to dave@example.com.
