Written by Keith C. Ivey Presentation by Jonathan Tang

Using Your Properly and Effectively Learn how to use your program Keep Your Lines Short Check where your message is going before Sending Use a blind copy when sending Mass Messages Use a Signature Don’t send people things that can’t be read

Using Your Properly and Effectively Don’t use formatting Make your Web address easy for recipients to use Don’t over quote Don’t send junk Use a meaningful Subject Line

Getting to Know Your Program Look through the manual or online guides Familiarize yourself with more than just basics that will help in handling s more efficiently

Keep Your Lines Short Wrap lines do always do a good job at it Standard line is set at 64 characters Lines exceeding more than 64 characters are hard to read, even if they fit on the whole screen

Where or Who are you sending it to? Double check who your message is going to Are you sending a reply to one person or the whole list? Important that you send your message to the appropriate recipient

Using Blind Copy Blind copy (bcc) is used to hide all the addresses of the various recipients Use bcc when you’re sending a message to a long list of people or when you don’t want the recipients to know who else is receiving the message. This prevents a cascade of messages when some recipients reply to everyone

Use a Signature Include a name and contact information with your s that are easily appended by programs Keep it simple and avoid cute sayings and ASCII art (i.e. smiley faces) Four lines should be very standard

Can They Read it? Obvious point: don’t send things people can’t read Unless you know for a fact the recipient can handle something much fancier, stick to plain ASCII Avoid special characters like curly quotes, apostrophes, and others, since they may show up different on the recipients screen

Don’t Use Formatting This includes italics, bold, fonts, tables, graphics, and other sorts of formatting If the recipients program isn’t the same as yours, the formatting that appears is hit or miss, it’ll work or it won’t. HTML messages, WINMAIL.DAT attachments, and other kinds of formatting information should be avoided too to prevent from showing up as garbage in their system

Web Addresses If you use Web addresses in your message be sure to include Many programs recognize that tag as a Web address and makes it a clickable link for the user to follow

Don’t Over Quote When quoting the message you’re replying to, include only the parts that are relevant to your reply Clarify which text is quote and which is your response The usual way to mark quoted text is with a greater-than sign ( > ) at the beginning of each line.

Don’t Send JUNK Most people who use daily has been annoyed by chain letters, virus alerts, and even the jokes that circulate by Sending spam (unsolicited bulk ) or unimportant s is more likely to make you enemies rather than friends or contacts.

Your Subject Line Subject Line should tell the recipient what the message is about It is mainly used to determine what the itself will be about. An with a general or blank subject line (i.e. “Question”) is likely to be given low priority