HotTipsForEmailers

Please! no HTML in email - if you must use colours & fonts, attach a .rtf or .pdf instead - or make a webpage, or a wiki page and send the URL. You can turn off hated naughty bad 'html mail' in the preferences of outlook express, hotmail or whatever other mail client you're using. There is an excellent tutorial on how to configure your email application to send plain text only here: http://expita.com/nomime.html

When replying to email: Quote what's necessary from the old email, delete the rest, add your reply UNDER the bit your replying to, so it reads chronologically and logically.

Leave one completely blank line before your answer (with no ">" etc) to be sure your comments can be read clearly in plain text.

Make good use of TO: / CC: / BCC: field (TO: put the person you are replying to (or the mailing list) in this field. CC = - carbon copy - for copying to people when you want everyone recieving the email to see that you're copying it to them, and BCC: - blind carbon copy - when you don't want every recipient to see who's getting the email, to preserve privacy etc.)

Please put the names & addresses of multiple recipients of mails you send in the "BCC:" field (rather than "TO:" or "CC:" ). This is serves to protect people's privacy, when communicating with a number of people at once especially if those people then use "reply-to-all". So you don't end up giving everyone's email to everyone else. Also, stops people doing 'reply to all' emails - which can be spammy.

Make correct attributions (like "Tom Phillips wrote..." not just "you wrote..." - especially when emailing groups and mailing lists)

Sending Attachments: if a file is over 1Mb in size an alternative to email should be used. If you have web-space, upload it there and email a link to the recipient. If the file is huge, burn a cd and send / carry it. Please don't send 'joke' video clips and images, they will eventually destroy mankind.

Check before you send! Pause and re-read before sending - be sure to spell check & proof read It only takes a few seconds, although we suggest 30mins if you're stressed ;-) - do ALL the recipients really need to see what you're sending? Also, it's easy to offend with email, make sure you're not being rude or obnoxious like me.

If you find something worth sharing on the web, send a URL and brief synopsis of what it's about rather that copy & pasting whole chunks of text, conversely, try not to send JUST obscure URLs with no explanation.

Lines should break properly at 64 - 70 characters to maintain good formatting when quoted.

If you Use a signature file (aka ".sig") it should be 4 lines or less, properly de-limited with "-- <ret>" (that's 'dash' 'dash' 'space' 'return'), so that sensible mail readers can handle them properly.

When replying to mail, especially on lists, try to reply only to the ones that really are replies - ie. don't find an email from someone you want to write to, then press 'reply', then change the Subject: field to the new topic you want to talk about. This is because some very good mail clients (like mutt ) use 'threading' - displaying email conversations by subject. If you reply to a message, it records this as a part of that conversation. Replying to a post, then changing the subject means that the post is displayed in a thread it doesn't belong in. If people then reply to that post - it gets really messy.

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