How to greet someone in an email during Covid-19 without sounding tone deaf

‘Emails need new language, new ways to express warmth and empathy and establish connections,’ says one expert – what worked before the pandemic won’t work now

Read and re-read your email before you send it, and use appropriate language and tone; save the gallows humour and edgy signoffs for social media

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Email greetings have become a beacon of goodwill amid Covid-19. Photo: Getty Images

Anita Rao Kashi

Published: 7:15am, 21 Sep 2020Updated: 7:32am, 21 Sep 2020

A few weeks ago, a cheery email landed in inboxes around the world. “Hope this email finds you well!!” it began.

There’s a pandemic raging; more than 27 million people have been ill and nearly a million have died. The email’s double exclamation marks were irritating: when people are feeling fragile they don’t need tone-deaf emails.

“Stay safe and hang in there”, the generic email ended, perhaps to disarm hostile readers who might otherwise have slammed down the delete button.

This year has been a disaster everywhere, in nearly every facet of life, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. Rising unemployment, economies down the toilet, socially distanced lives, a future so unpredictable that making plans for next week seems unthinkable. A vaccine is a dim light on the far horizon. If anything, the pandemic has stripped the need for pretension, so cheery greetings sound hollow and insincere.

As the pandemic has raged, email has become one of the most important channels of communication. Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Randy Malamud’s book, titled Email, and Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, address the problem of internet communication.

“It’s surprising how pedestrian email is, how banal, given how intricately interwoven it is with our existence,” Malamud writes. “Or maybe it’s not surprising at all: maybe it’s just the mirror held up to life, and we are precisely as trite as our email suggests.”