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It involves knowing how to communicate properly and professionally via email. This is especially important for business communications, but the home user can benefit from these suggestions as well.
Even if you are newbie email user, following these suggestions will go a long way towards giving an impression that you’re an internet pro.
Check the size of your attachments before you send them. If they are over 200K in size, compress or zip the file, or resize it, if the file is a picture.
This is usually a problem with digital camera pictures. Right out of the camera, most digital pictures are very large, usually over 1Mb.
Use an editing program like Paint or Paint Shop Pro to cut them down to below 200K, or here’s an easier way: install Microsoft’s Image Resizer Power Toy.
Sending an email that is over 600K in size makes the process harder for the person receiving it. They have to wait for all that data to download.
If you send a file that big to person who only has dial-up (modem) based internet service, it will really clog up their email, and they will want to hurt you.
Better yet, if you want to share digital pictures, upload them to a photo sharing website. Google offers free Picasa software, and a huge amount of server space for you to do just this, and it comes with an (also) free Google mail account.
3.) Read your email, and check it for grammar, spelling and punctuation before you send it. Just because you are sending email doesn’t mean you can forget all about proper writing techniques. It’s just as difficult to read bad writing on a screen as it is in a book. Practice good writing along with good email etiquette.
4.) Don’t forward chain letters. I know some of them say you’ll have 7 years of bad luck if you don’t send them on. Ignore this. Just delete it. It will help out so many people, and you'll be practicing really good email etiquette. :)
5.) Leave the message thread on your reply. I personally find it annoying to get a reply back from someone without the message thread. Your message arrives and just says Yes. Yes? Yes to what? I send out lots of emails. How am I supposed to remember what we were talking about 6 days ago?
6.) If you are writing a long email, here’s some advice that will save your sanity. Write long emails in some other word editor like MS Word, or Works, or even a plain old text message window. Then when you are done, and it looks good, cut and paste it into an email message window.
7.) Keep your email format simple. No loud background, no funny colors, etc.. These additions makes it very difficult to read your email message; practice good email etiquette, and just leave the background white, please.
8.) Don’t leave the subject line blank. This will cause the receiving ISP to target your email as spam, and your email may get deleted.
Also, avoid using all caps, or short, general terms such as Hi, Help or Please Respond in the subject for the same reason.
9.) If you are sending an email to a group of people who don’t know each other,
put all of the email addresses in the “BCC” line of your message window, not the “To” line. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy, and it will keep each person from seeing all the other recipient addresses.
NOT doing this opens up all the addresses in the email to someone who could grab and sell them to an spammer. VERY annoying and very bad email etiquette in internet land.
10.) Never give out your phone number or other personal information without confirming you are communicating with a reputable party. Legitimate businesses will NEVER ask you for your credit card and bank account information via email. And never give out the personal contact information of others without their specific permission. Paying attention will you avoid the horrors of
identity theft.
11.) Don’t click on any email attachment, especially those with an .exe or .vbs or .com suffix (i.e, christmas.exe) without making sure that attachment has been checked for viruses. It could infect your PC, and you don't want the headaches that would cause you. Most reputable ISPs have virus checking turned on automatically.
This holds true even if the email appears to come from someone you know. If the attachment is virus generated, it's capable of picking up your friend's email address off of another infected computer.
12.) Set a rule for yourself about forwarding emails to your friends and family. If the subject isn’t interesting enough to print out, put in an envelope, and mail via the Post office, it probably isn’t interesting enough to send via email.
If you do decide to forward an email that has already been forwarded several times, here's a nice thing to do:
Click Forward on the email. On the new message window that opens, remove all the forwarding email address information from the beginning of the message, so that only the joke or actual message is left to send. The next person you forward it to will thank you because they won't have to scroll through all of that extra info to get to the actual message.
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