Internet Tutorials | John Faughnan | Robert Elson

Email and Lists: Rules of Thumb

Email Features to Look For

Whatever email software you use, it should have these features. Email software is something you will use every day. It's more important that it be powerful and fast rather than simple and easy to learn.

• Able to organize messages into folders or mailboxes.
• Sort messages by sender, date, priority, etc.
• Ability to filter messages into folders based on sender, keywords, etc.
• Able to comfortably handle thousands of messages. Email software that make every message into a separate "file" bog down with large numbers of messages.
• Uses a file format for messages (ascii) that you can read even without the mail program. Over the years you'll accumulate tens of thousands of messages that may have significant archival value. If they're stuck in some obscure file format, they'll eventually become unuseable.
• Be sure address book is either ascii based (can read with a text editor) or that it can export into some useable format.
• Lots of shortcuts that you'll take advantage of with daily use.
• Simplicity permits reliability.
• Try before you buy (most products now have trial versions available on web sites). Email software must be fast to use.

Email Services and Addresses

• Changing your email address is a royal pain. Try to get an address that will last. Alumni organizations almost always offer email addresses to alumni, these will last as long as you pay up each year.
• You don't need to use the email address that your Internet Service Provider gives you. You could pay an local or national ISP for your local dial-up network connection, but use the email services of your distant alumni organization.
• Free email services are purchased by subjecting you to junk mail. Service is often abysmal and these companies are not long-lived.
• Whatever email service you use, find out how you can forward your mail if you decide to go elsewhere. Don't use an email service that doesn't support forwarding!
• It is often convenient to have multiple email boxes on one account (family account, small business). See if your email service provider can do this.
• Some companies and organizations promise an email address for life. They give you an address which is an alias or pointer to your real email address. You use this alias as though it were your email addresss. You can change your real email address, but your correspondents can continue to use the alias address. This service is inexpensive to provide, and many respectable organizations provide it for members. (Such as the Association for Computing Machinery.) Beware offers of free email forwarding. It's likely your name and address info will be sold to Spammers.

Email Etiquette and Survival

• Sarcasm doesn't work on email. Use smileys when meaning might be ambiguous :-)
• Don't reply to every message you get. Use short notes.
• It's easy to forge an email message. If a message you receive seems odd or out of character, confirm it by other means.
• Be careful about opening an email attachment. A classic attack is to send someone a forged email, with a harmful program attached. The forged message is from a trusted associate, and the program is disguised as something benign. A Microsoft Word or Excel spreadsheet attachment can carry a dangerous "macro virus".
• Don't send something by email that you wouldn't want everyone in the world seeing.

Lists

• Be careful you don't send a personal message to a public mailing list!
• If your email package does not do automated filtering, subscribe to the digest version of a list. If it does do automated filtering, subscribe to the regular version.
• Don't send "unsubscribe" messages to everyone on a mailing list. It's quite rude. If you don't know how to unsubscribe, email the list owner.
• When you join a list, save the message that tells you how to unsubscribe.