What to write when you forward an email

A forward needs three lines from you at the top: why it reached this person, what you want them to do, and by when. Everything under those lines is evidence. Without them, you have sent homework.

"FYI" pasted above forty quoted messages is the email version of setting a box down on someone's desk and walking away.

I think the bare forward is a small act of laziness wearing the costume of sharing. You moved the work. You did not do any of it.

Why forwarded threads get ignored

Forwarded threads get ignored because you send the transcript and keep the story.

You lived through this one. You read the messages as they landed, a few a day, and you know which name belongs to the person who is reliable about numbers and which belongs to the person who replies at midnight with opinions.

Your reader gets a slab of text, newest message on top, the beginning buried at the bottom, written in shorthand by people who were all in the same conversation.

Before they can help you, they have to do all of this:

• Find the message that actually matters.
• Work out who half the names are.
• Check whether the problem got solved somewhere in the middle.
• Guess what you want, because you did not say.

Four jobs before the job. Most people take the cheapest option available, which is closing the tab and meaning to come back to it.

The three lines that make a forward usable

Put three short lines above the quoted text: why this is theirs, what you want, and the day you need it.

• The reason is one clause long: they own the thing, or they asked for it, or they are the only person who can say yes.
• The ask is a verb with an object, like approve the second invoice, or tell me if the figure is wrong.
• The date is a real day of the week. "Soon" is not a date.

The whole note looks like this. "Forwarding the invoice thread because you own supplier payments. Can you approve or reject the second invoice by Thursday? Everything below the first message is background you can skip."

Twenty-nine words. The reader knows their job before they have read a single quoted line, and if they trust you, they may never read one.

Fix the subject line while you are in there. "Fwd: Fwd: RE: invoice q" tells the reader nothing except that this has been passed around before it got to them.

Add a fourth line when the thread has heat in it. Say what you already tried, so nobody suggests it back to you as a fresh idea.

Trim the thread, do not summarize it

Leave the original messages in place and cut only the parts that carry no information.

Your summary is your reading of the thread. When the argument later turns on what somebody promised, the exact words are the whole point, and a paraphrase is the thing people end up fighting about.

Worth cutting before you send:

• Signature blocks and legal disclaimers stacked six deep down the page.
• Older threads that got glued on underneath and predate anything you are asking about.
• Lines about a person who is now one of the recipients.

That last one is manners rather than tidiness. A thread written for two people becomes a thread written for five, and nobody who wrote the early messages was asked whether that was fine.

"FYI" is not an assignment

If you want somebody to act, write the ask, because FYI tells the reader that nothing is expected of them and they will believe you.

Most arguments about dropped work come down to one person saying "I sent it to you" and the other saying "you sent it to me", which is a different sentence entirely.

I would rather get a blunt forward that says "this is yours now" than a courteous one that leaves me working out whether I have been handed a task or a newsletter.

If you genuinely mean FYI, write that as well: "no action needed, keeping you in the loop on the supplier mess." Two seconds, and the guessing stops.

When what you want is a decision rather than a task, the note on top has more work to do, and it needs to lay out the options and name your default.

Forwards worth not sending

Some forwards do more damage than the missing context they were meant to fix.

• Forwarding a private complaint to the person being complained about.
• Forwarding upward so that someone feels watched into moving faster.
• Forwarding to a group, which reliably produces a thread nobody owns.
• Forwarding a thread purely as a receipt for a fight you expect to have later.

The second one deserves an argument. Forwarding a stalled thread to somebody's manager is nearly always worse than sending one more direct message with a date in it, and people reach for it because it is easier than sending that message.

It works once. Then you have spent that person, and you will need them again.

The reader with the least context is you, later

The worst-served reader of any forward is your own future self.

I forward things to my own inbox constantly: threads I do not want to think about today, half-decisions I would rather make on a calmer morning.

Later I open them and cannot work out what past me wanted, and past me had my entire brain and every bit of the context. A colleague has considerably less than that.

So write the top note even when the recipient is you. Why it is here, what it needs, when.

My own first pass at that note comes out apologetic and vague, four clauses of throat-clearing before any verb turns up. Catching it at the moment of sending, instead of during a rueful reread the next morning, is most of what Unvent does for me.

A forward is the cheapest message you will send all week. It is also the one most likely to sit unopened until somebody asks about it out loud, at which point you will forward it again, with FYI on top.