beware the onward audience
An email can easily be forwarded to someone else, and as we know people don’t always read emails in full (or at all) but that doesn’t stop them being forwarded. You can’t rely on your recipients to be sensible about who they copy in, because its your reputation that’s at stake. You might be targeting at a friend, and the message ends up with your manager. You might be targeting the manager, and it ends up with his staff. So don’t send email you wouldn’t want read by a wider audience.
sending to the right person
Sending your emails to the wrong person, just because they share a name with your intended recipient, can be quite annoying for that person particularly if it happens more than once. This then has the risk for you that they simply delete the mail and leave you not knowing that it was never delivered.
MS Outlook is very helpful and will auto-populate the recipient’s name after you type the first few letters. It will do this even if you sent to the wrong person last time, helping you to make the same mistake over and over again
In the last company I worked for,
there were 11 David Jones’s
and 8 Mark Smith’s. In
copying in the boss
You may think a good way to get people read and act on your email is to copy it to your boss, with the idea that the boss will them make sure it gets done, or the person you sent it to won't want to be seen not doing their work. In practice bosses get hundreds of emails and probably won't thank you for this, and the email receiver will almost certainly be annoyed at your tactic and be less likely what you want.