e-mail Tips and Tricks

Just about everybody has used e-mail by now, so we're not going to spend much time on the basics. e-mail is one of the simplest online tools to use in any case. However, there are still a lot of common mistakes people make when using e-mail, and we'll look at these in greater detail. Applying the suggestions here will make you a much more effective e-mail user.

Who owns my e-mail? Your employer has no doubt provided you with an e-mail account. Do you ever use it for personal stuff? Have you ever said something in your work e-mail that you wouldn't want your employer to see? The courts have ruled that e-mail doesn't have the same privacy protections as mail delivered by the USPS. The argument is that the e-mail infrastructure is owned by the employer and is provided so that you can do work. Therefore, the employer is legally entitled to read your e-mail, and all messages on the system are the property of the employer. Regardless of how you feel about it, that's a good thing to know. It's also a good reason to get your own personal e-mail account, and to create a separation between your work account and your personal one.

Personal e-mail accounts: There are many free services that you can use to get a personal e-mail account. You can even get more than one account if you have the need. Several of the most popular are Google's GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and Microsoft's old Hotmail or new Outlook services. All you have to do is create an account, and then you can log in to check and send messages from the service's website.

Web-based service vs. installed application: Some e-mail services work by logging into a website. Others use an installed application on your computer to check your e-mail such as Microsoft's Outlook, the free open source Thunderbird, and Apple's Mail application. Many services allow you to work both ways. For example, you can check your NAU e-mail by going to the following web address: http://iris.nau.edu/owa, or you can check your NAU e-mail from Outlook or another installed e-mail client application. The web account approach is nice when you're using a public computer in a café or computer lab, or borrowing a friend's computer. The installed e-mail client is faster and more powerful, and you can set it up to check all of your accounts in one place, but getting it configured for the first time may require some technical assistance.

Syntax: An e-mail message is easily recognizable. There will be a name, followed by the @ symbol, and then the domain where the e-mail account is hosted. For example, NAU uses firstname.lastname@nau.edu for faculty and staff accounts, and nauid@nau.edu for student accounts, where the nauid is usually a combination of your initials and a number, such as abc12@nau.edu. If you click on an e-mail link on a web page, it will launch your installed e-mail client application and address a new message to the recipient.

e-mail etiquette: There are a few commonly accepted rules of behavior when using e-mail. Don't use ALLCAPS or people will think you're shouting! Because it's easy to read a confrontational e-mail message, get angry, and fire something nasty back, it's best if you don't respond to provocative e-mails by e-mail. Pick up the phone or talk to the sender in person, and they'll usually be more polite. If you must respond by e-mail, compose your response but don't send it immediately. Come back later and re-read your response, or have someone else read it and offer you advice. Remember that it's very easy to misinterpret e-mail messages because the tone of the message doesn't come through with the text. Was the sender being literal or sarcastic, or possibly just blowing off steam, but not intending you to take the message seriously? Try to avoid using directives like "You need to..." and rephrase as "Would you be able to..." when making requests. It's a courtesy not to forward a controversial message without the permission of the original author. It's also important to remember that someone might not extend you that courtesy, so don't write anything in e-mail that you wouldn't want attributed to you and passed along to the person you were talking about.

emoticons and abbreviations: When you're "talking" to an online friend in an e-mail message, discussion board, or chat room, you can't see each other's faces, so you miss the smiles, winks, and frowns that add subtle meaning to conversation and lend context to cold words. Longtime navigators of the web have come up with a substitute. People add "emoticons" or "smilies" to text messages to try to add a layer of emotion or intent to the plain text. Here are a few examples:

In addition to emoticons, experienced users have adopted a variety of shorthand abbreviations to save time and keystrokes in expressing frequently repeated concepts. Here's a beginners glossary:

Sending Messages:

• Recipients: When you compose a new message to someone, it's customary to put the most important recipient(s) in the To: field. If there are other people who might need to see the message but who are more peripheral to it, they should go in the CC: field. The message is "carbon copied" to them for their information, but generally they aren't expected to reply. (I wonder how many people remember what a carbon copy really is?) There's a third option, called BCC: or "blind carbon copy." When someone receives your e-mail message, they will see the recipients listed in the To: and CC: fields, but will not see who was BCC'ed on the message. This is useful if you want to give someone a private "heads up" on a sensitive topic.
• The Subject Line: It's good practice to use a meaningful subject line for your message. An informative subject line allows your recipients to get a sense of the message topic while scanning their inbox before opening the message.
• Styled Text: Your e-mail program may allow you to compose your messages with fonts, text colors, and other stylistic elements. Resist the urge to do so. It's the message that matters; not the style. Styled messages rarely look the same from one e-mail client to another, and the style or formatting makes the message larger and slower to send and receive. It's only e-mail. Plain text is good enough.
• Message Priority: Unless your e-mail message is really, really important (and if it was, would you be using e-mail to communicate?), don't flag it as Urgent. Most people don't pay any attention to the message priority. If you flag all your messages as urgent, people will just think you have a big ego. But if you flag your message as low priority, people might ignore it entirely. Better to just leave all your messages set at normal.
• Attachments: Sometimes, you may attach a file(s) to an e-mail message. This can significantly increase the size of the message. Be especially careful when attaching uncompressed photos since the message may get so big that you'll have difficulty sending it, or the recipients will have difficulty receiving it. It's far better to put your images up on a photo sharing site like Flickr and just send people a link to the site instead. As a general rule, try not to send an attachment that is more than a megabyte in size. If you need to share a big file with someone, use a cloud-based file sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Receiving Messages:

• Reading Messages: If you've been away from your mail for a while, it's good to scan your Inbox (the place where unread messages are waiting) strategically. When people have a lot of new mail, they usually read messages from oldest to newest. However, if a conversation has been going on without you, it makes sense to look at the most recent message in a "thread" before weighing in with your response. Recall that in a message that has been going around, the newest comments are generally at the top of the message and the oldest ones are at the bottom. Possibly the situation is already resolved or the comment you're about to make has already been suggested.
• Replying to Messages: When you receive a message that was addressed to multiple recipients, you should think about whether to reply to just the sender, using the Reply option, or to everyone in the recipients list. Use Reply-All thoughtfully. Consider who needs to see your reply. If you're having a conversation in which it's important to keep everyone in the loop, Reply-All makes sense. However, if an instructor sends out a generic welcome message to the entire class, Reply-All is probably the wrong choice and will result in a proliferation of non-essential e-mail. When you reply to a message, where do you type your response? In most cases, people reply at the top of the message, so the original message is below. Occasionally, when replying to long messages with numerous questions, people reply in-line. In other words, they break up the original message and respond directly below each question.
• Forwarding: Sometimes, when you receive a message, you realize that it really should go to someone else. In this case, you can readdress the message and Forward it to someone else. Generally, you wouldn't add much comment to the original message but rather just pass it along.
• Filtering Messages: For important people (your boss, your spouse, etc.), or for people with whom you correspond a lot, it's handy to create a filter that puts all of that person's messages to you in a separate mail folder so that you can search it easily. You can set up mail filters that look for names or e-mail addresses in the From: field, for words or phrases in the subject line, and much more.

Signatures: Sometimes people set up an automatic e-mail "signature" that contains contact information. The signature is added automatically at the bottom of your outgoing messages. Avoid the temptation to put too much junk in your e-mail signature, such as embedded images, because they make your messages larger and slower to send and receive, without adding much useful information.

Managing Spam: Unsolicited e-mail, also known as junkmail or "spam," can be a huge frustration. Most e-mail programs offer junk mail filtering, but so does your e-mail service provider. Sometimes, when both the provider and your e-mail application try to filter messages, it can result in conflicts. NAU recommends turning your e-mail application's spam filter off and letting them handle it. It's a good idea to check the messages in your spam filter to make sure it's catching only junk and not important messages. On the other hand, if a lot of junk mail is slipping through the spam filter, there are a few things you can do.

1. Consider creating a "throwaway" e-mail account that you use for shopping and signing up for services. When the spammers find it, as they most certainly will, just abandon the old account and create a new one.
2. Never reply to spam. This sounds obvious, but whenever you set up an e-mail auto-reply (such as a vacation or out-of-office message), that's just what you're doing. Once the spammers know they've got an active address, they will send you even more junkmail.
3. If you're getting unwanted e-mail from a legitimate business, unsubscribe from their mailing list. Most good businesses will honor your request.
4. When you submit your contact or purchase information on a web form, be sure to uncheck the boxes that let them send you special offers, occasional updates, etc.
5. Tell companies with which you do business not to share your personal information with others.
6. Try activating your application's spam filter and turning up the sensitivity.