Using Email at Gizmos, Inc: Toolkit: PC Workshop

I wanted to dazzle you here with facts and figures about email. Worldwide traffic stats. Demographics. Comparisons to snail mail. Averages per man, woman, and child. Graphs and charts. Web sites that authoritatively monitored usage. Guess what? There aren't any.

It took me longer than it should have for the DUH! reaction to settle in. The U.S. Postal Service can count envelopes and stamps. For email, there is no post office, there are no envelopes. It is a stream of bits, not a number of atoms. It is uncountable. Spammers can buy a CD-ROM full of addresses and with one click send out hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Again and again, all day long.

The barriers to entry are high. You must have a computer connected to the Internet that you know how to use, which means you have paid hundreds or thousands of dollars, you've wrestled with the technology and you at least know how to type. Where radio, telephone, and TV are in over 95% of U.S. homes, I also read that 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate. The percentage of Americans who read newspapers let alone books (or vote) is well below half and slipping steadily. So I think there's some upper limit for the Internet well below radio, telephone, and TV.

Then we can start to think about the 95% of the world's humans who don't live in the U.S. Two-thirds of them have never used a telephone.

For those who are online, email is ubiquitous. It has become the basic unit of written communication.

How well do you know Madonna? Do you consider Tiger Woods a buddy? What about former South African President Nelson Mandela?

According to the "small world" theory, you should be just six handshakes away from each of them. But can anyone in the world really reach anyone else through a chain of just six friends?

Skills

Tools

An email client is the software that you use to compose, read, sort, and store your email. I'm not sure which is the most popular. Microsoft's Outlook comes with every copy of Windows but that doesn't mean people use it. Many organizations have standardized on Netscape or Lotus. Eudora is also very popular. If you use an AOL address and an AOL account, you're stuck with the clients built into its overall software package.

Plenty of people do all their email online, so they don't even need an email client -- just a web browser.

Beginners' guides

In 1775, the postal system that the Congress created helped bind the new nation together, support the growth of commerce, and ensure a free flow of ideas and information.

While the Post Office was a great idea in its time, turns out it was a bottleneck. Replace it something faster, and lots more letters get sent.

There were hundreds-of-thousands of personal computer users sending and receiving 'email messages' using dial-up systems prior to the Internet becoming available for general use.

Microsoft's Outlook

Qualcomm's Eudora

Email content

Why do I call email asynchronous written messages? Because we exchange them at different times. For synchronous messages, like chat or IM, we use different software, different protocols.

I'm not going to try to give menu-level how-to instructions for all the email clients that you could be using to manage your email. Every email client or reader has settings and options that you should explore and discover. Use the built-in help buttons for features such as forwarding, address books, and group replies. For common software, search Google for help and tips.

Netiquette

I understand typos, wordiness, and fuzzy expression because everyone, including me, is in a hurry and writing well is hard. It takes a longer time to write fewer words. I don't understand people who seem to lack common courtesy or a sense of their reader.

Over the past two decades, a set of best practices has evolved, collectively known as netiquette. Too cute? Well, it's better than e-etiquette, don't you think?

Thou shalt include a clear and specific subject line.
Thou shalt edit any quoted text down to the minimum thou needest.
Thou shalt read thine own message thrice before thou sendest it.
Thou shalt ponder how thy recipient might react to thy message.
Thou shalt check thy spelling and thy grammar.
Thou shalt not curse, flame, spam or USE ALL CAPS.
Thou shalt not forward any chain letter.
Thou shalt not use e-mail for any illegal or unethical purpose.
Thou shalt not rely on the privacy of e-mail, especially from work.
When in doubt, save thy message overnight and reread it in the light of the dawn.

And the "Golden Rule" of E-Mail:

That which thou findest hateful to receive, sendest thou not unto others.

Signatures

Have your email software automatically add some text after your name at the end of your email. It can convey all the information that comes pre-printed on a letterhead or business card: name, job title, organization, slogan, contact info. Many people also add a pithy quotation like the cartoon on the office door or bumper sticker on the car.

Find one, adapt one, write your own, use ASCII art. Don't make it too wide (over 70 characters) or it may wrap to the next line. Don't make it too high, either, or it becomes annoying. Change it often, or you'll bore your friends.

**whale**
               __   __
              __ \ / __
             / \ | / \
                 \|/
            _,.---v---._
   /\__/\ /            \
   \_ _/ /              \
     \ \_|           @ __|
hjw \                \_
`97 \     ,__/       /
     ~~~`~~~~~~~~~~~~~~/~~~~

Acronyms and Emoticons

Some people are fond of using acronyms. Useful time-savers? Too cute for business? You run the risk on being misunderstood, so be careful.

Speaking of cute, check out the right-hand column below. Learn more about emoticons, aka smileys, also spelled smilies. These symbols, which are mini-ASCII art, help convey tone and emotion. Practice using them at the Bistro.

acronyms

emoticons or smileys

AFAIK - as far as I know
B4N - bye for now
BTW - by the way
FWIW - for what it's worth
GTG - got to go
IMHO - in my humble opinion
LOL - laughing out loud
OTOH - on the other hand
ROTFL - rolling on the floor laughing
TIA - thanks in advance
YMMV - your mileage may vary

:-)	smile
:-(	frown
;-)	wink


*3:>**	Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
8(:-)	Mickey Mouse

Lack of opening and closing

Just because the email was addressed to me doesn't mean it was meant for me. Just because you know that your Hotmail account is yours, doesn't mean that I remember it or ever knew it.

I have noticed a similar phenomenon when I pick up the phone and say hello and the person who called starts talking without identifying himself or herself. If I were equally rude, I'd just hang up.

Lack of context

You send thirty emails a day. One of them asks me a question. Three days later, I respond with an answer, but nothing else. Of course, the question is fresh in my mind when I type my answer. But you're saying, "Give me a little help here. Am I supposed to remember every question I ask some professor? Do you think that's all I have to do in life, worry about this course?"

A short copy-and-paste quote of what I'm responding to is most helpful. I use << and >> and I recommend that you do the same or similarly. Learn more.

Email management

Filters

Who's in charge around here? Some email providers call them rules. AOL calls them controls. You can exclude and include on the basis of sender, subject, attachment, or textual content.

Backups

If your email software doesn't keep copies of all the email you send and receive, you should do so yourself. Then back-up those folders. The whole folder will be later searchable through Start | Find.

Multiple accounts

Use this free service to acquire a disposable e-mail address, which will point at your real address. When you give that Sneakemail address to a Web form or some other online business, you avoid the risk of having your real e-mail address abused or bought and sold. Messages will still reach you, but in a way that you maintain; toss the address away once trash starts to appear, and start afresh with a new address.

Now part of Microsoft's Passport service, Hotmail makes it easy for you to do the same thing as Sneakemail yet manage it all through a Web site so the clutter doesn't accumulate in your main mailbox.

Combat spam with multiple email addresses. When one mailbox gets inundated with junk mail, simply close it down. Choose from a database of 1,400 free services in 85 countries.

Web-based post office

All you need is a web browser to send and receive email. Hotmail is probably the most popular. If you have an AOL account, you can get online anytime anywhere, go to AOL.com, and access your email. Remember if you delete it there, it won't be available to download when you get home.

Finding addresses

There is no complete directory of all email addresses. One meta search -- MESA, the Meta Email Search Agent -- queries some of the big ones such as WhoWhere, Bigfoot, and Yahoo's People Search.

Spam

Spam is any email you didn't ask for, especially from a stranger. It's like litter. You can't do anything about it. As so often, online or off, let the Golden Rule apply. Please don't send any spam yourself.

Note that I'm not talking about nasty private flames or about unpleasant email from your boss. "We have six meetings scheduled, ..." Nor does annoying, stupid email always have to come from a stranger. The classic case is the naive friend who sends an email chain-letter virus hoax. That's spam.

Useful tools

As you can imagine for anything as popular as email, a legion of teenager geeks for the last twenty years have been writing little software utilities to make email easier to manage. Let us all pause for a moment for a thank-you. At places like Information City, you'll find filters, security encoders/decoders, redirecting tools, automatic signature changers and on and on.

Get rid of those little symbols such as ">" that appear in quoted email. Copy and paste the email into this web page's form and then strip it.

Fast developing innovations in JavaTM technology are giving email the media richness currently found in Web pages. This article is the third in a series that looks at the changes in email today and into the future, and its impact on everything from family to corporate interactions.

If you're buried in correspondence, let Mailbag Assistant ($30), a powerful and user-friendly e-mail organizer, come to your rescue with tools to search, organize and archive your overflowing message folders. It complements your mail program, opens all your messages with ease, and leaves your original e-mail folders completely intact. Use it to find relevant correspondence fast, extract attachments and HTML messages, create compressed e-mail archives, export messages, and much more. Mailbag Assistant supports Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, Poco, Pegasus, The Bat!, Forte Agent,Calypso, FoxMail, and EML message files.

Headers

The first part of a received e-mail message contains information about how the message got routed while traveling the Internet. As you can see on the screen shot to the right, the headers can easily exceed a short message in length.

These headers can tell you a lot about where the mail came from and how it got to you. For example, this email from GerryMcGovern.com came from Ireland. See the .ie and dublin.eircom?

These headers may not be displayed if the e-mail software program keeps them hidden (usually an option) or puts them at the bottom, where you can ignore them.

Don't confuse these headers, which you don't need, with the heading information drawn from them, the Subj:, Date:, From:, and To: that you do need and is displayed separately.

What I do

Since there are no widely accepted best practices for informal business email, it may be helpful for you to know why I do what I do. I urge you to either emulate me or to have your own thoughtful reason to do it differently.

Reality check

Periodically, I view email that I have sent to others on their computer using their email client. I also send a copy of an email to myself. I am sometimes dismayed, but at least I know and it keeps me humble. Typos, typos, typos.

Subject line

If you don't put anything, it comes through as (no subject). This is a problem for people who get lots of email and for email clients that sort by subject line.

If you don't have an accurate subject line, the same problems can result. The Lockergnome and M-Business emails provide more useful info. The three in the middle -- (no subject) -- aren't very helpful.

You have to use your judgment when responding to someone's email. Should you start a new subject? What if it addressed three different topics. Do you reply all-in-one or separate them into threads?

Note the patterns at the Bistro. Some long threads have strayed. For other topics, you have to check several threads with similar names.

Opening

When I started using email, it confused me because it was between a telephone call and a letter or memo.

It had the back-and-forth of a telephone call, yet it was written like a letter.

It had the look of a letter or memo, yet the tone I kept using was informal and chatty.

For professional purposes, I had to find a tone and style that I had no models for. I was sure that consistency would be important.

To start without an opening would be as rude as responding to "Hello" on the telephone without identifying yourself. To start with Dear seemed too formal. I chose Hi because it struck an appropriate universal tone.

Until 2003, I put a comma after Hi because I was punctuating it like dialogue, not like a formal opening to a letter. The "Dear" in Dear Mr. Smith: is an adjective. To not put a comma after the Hi in Hi, Mr. Smith would be making it an adjective, which isn't correct. Mr. Smith may be dear to me or less than dear. I'm not sure how he could be less than hi. Low?

In 2003, tired of explaining the above and seeing no one else do it my way, I gave in to the norms. I now omit the comma and put a dash after the name.

Quoting

This is an advantage of email over letters. I recommend that you use quotes to ease the communication process. I may have sent and read a hundred emails since I sent the one you're responding to. To continue the conversation without quoting to remind me of the context forces me either to hunt for the email I sent you or to not understand you.

The trick is to quote only enough for me to follow. If your subject line is accurate, it isn't every helpful to quote the whole message you're responding to at the top or bottom of yours.

Two quoting styles are common. The style I use marks the beginning and end of the whole quote. The other style marks the beginning of each line.

The other question is what mark to use. I use << and >>, which are the most common. It doesn't matter as long as you're consistent.

URLs

In many email clients, a well-formed URL is clickable. I always put the whole URL, http:// and everything. I also start each on a new line to accommodate as many email clients as possible.

Spelling and grammar

As usual, this is up to you. If you were working for me and I would be recommending you for a promotion or a raise, you'd be wise to run your work email through a spell-checker before I saw it. A quick proofread can catch most syntax problems. (Syntax is sentence structure, not what you pay at the liquor store.)

Having said that, I recognize that email is less formal than most traditional business writing. Personally, I'm quite tolerant of surface errors as long as I understand what's being said and I'd appreciate the same indulgence.

Closing

As with my other choices, I wanted one phrase or word that would not be perfect for every occasion but would be acceptable for all occasions. Sincerely seemed too insincere and frequently false, too much old-world like paper. Best and regards seemed OK but bland. To balance my opening of hi, I could use bye, but that seemed too cute. Omitting it altogether and putting only my name seemed too abrupt.

At the time, I was corresponding with Parnell Hall, a novelist, who used cheers. I hadn't seen anything better, so I adopted it. In almost a decade and after thousands of emails, I've not seen anything better. The only times I have changed "Cheers" were for condolences.

Many people use a sig, or signature file. This is a little snippet of text which the email client will automatically include at the end of every email. I rarely use them, only in formal situations when I type in the Associate Professor, Medaille College stuff.

File exchange

Email is plain text, or ASCII text. That is, you can use the four rows of characters and symbols on your keyboard. If you want to share a text file with someone, type it out or copy and paste it into the email composition area.

If you want to send anything else, you have ask your email software to specially encode it. That's the easy part. The person receiving your email has to have to software to un-encode it.

You don't personally have to encode it; your email software will do it for you. For example, you may want to send an image or a spreadsheet or a video. The simplest way to do that is to attach it to the email.

Every email client has an attach function. If you try to attach a text file, such as an .htm file, the email client may well just include it in the email, on the assumption it's doing you a favor.

But most of us have email readers that will display HTML as per the instructions. For example, rather than displaying

Best Bet

With any attachment, compress it into a .zip file first and then attach the .zip file to the email. If you have Winzip on your computer, you should be able to right-click on the file name on your desktop or Windows Explorer and choose from several options.

Organized Email

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modified: March 4, 2003 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/gizmos/toolkit/collaboration/email.htm

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