Before getting into the specifics of any internet email software, there are a few basic concepts to understand.
First off, every email message has two parts, the envelope (or message header) and the enclosure (or message body). Just like a conventional letter, email cannot be delivered without an addressee.
Internet email addresses come in the form of username@host.domain. For instance, my email address is alan@alanrowoth.com. This means that I am the unique user who's email resides at thehost computer named mailbox.lpl.org. You cannot send mail to me unless you know both parts of that address and include them both, delimited by the @ character that seperates the username from the mail host. Everyone on our mail server has an email address that ends in @mailbox.lpl.org. There are thousands of other mailboxes named "alan" on the net, but no more than one at each individual mail host.
Every properly formed internet mail address will have at one "@" sign in it and at least one "." (period) character within the hostname. Older UUCP mail systems sometimes use a "bang" address where different parts of the address begin with the "!" character, but less than 1% of internet users still have these antiquated addresses.
There are a few standard rules for RFC-822 compliant email addresses. The most important are:
With some mailers (such as our old First Class) mailer, the user had to specify a mail gateway tfor mail outside the local system. The internet has become the defacto email gateway for all mail systems, therefore most systems (like our current Eudora) no longer require the gateway information. An address that you used to type as President@whitehouse.gov,Internet should now just be President@whitehouse.gov.
The addressee of an email message will receive a copy of that message if their email address appears either in the To: field, the CC: field, or the BCC: field. There are some subtle differences in how these fields are used by the mailer. The To: field is for the primary recipient(s) of the message, the people who may be expected to take action upon its contents. The CC: field is used for anyone who may receive a "carbon copy" of this communication. Usually these folks are copied on the content just to keep abreast of the work that the sender and recipient are doing. The BCC: field allows the sender to send a "Blind Carbon Copy" of the message to someone.
The To: and CC: fields and their contents appear in the message when it is recieved by the addressees. The contents of the BCC field are never viewed with the message. The two primary uses for this field include address field suppression, where the message is being sent to a large group of people and the sender wants to minimize the size of the message headers or keep the recipient list confidential. The other use for this field is to send a carbon copy of the message to someone without the recipient's knowledge.
Every email message must have at least one recipient listed on the To: line or it will not be sent.
You are always encouraged to include a Subject: line for your email messages. A short, one line description of the content of the message that the recipient can use to easily prioritize their mail reading and recall the message at a later date. Effective subject lines might read:
Try to stay away from nonintuitive subject lines like
Many emailers won't send a message without a subject line. Even if yours will, it is not recommended. Take the time to compose a good subject line. Remember what the newsies want: Who When Where and Why.
Message Headers contain a good deal more useful information, including the sender address (contained in either a From: or Sender: field) and the Reply-To: address is that differs from the sender. The time and date that the message was sent, and occasionally information about the emailer used, data types contained in the enclosure, and other types of content encoding. For the most part, you needn't concern yourself with any of the header information other than subject, sender, and addressee. Most of the rest of it is simply used by the email software.
Most email messages contain a single element in their enclosure, known as the message "body". Normally this is plain ASCII text, but more and more often messages are being sent across the internet with text that is styled or enhanced with Web browser like content. Be careful not to send enhanced content to someone if you are not sure that their mailer can handle those enhancements, or you may make your message totally unreadable to them..
Rules for creating the content of your email text are mostly simple common sense. Keep the message short and to the point. Spell words correctly. Punctuate your emails just as you would any written communication. Avoid run on sentences and break up the content into multiple paragraphs if it becomes lengthy.
Often when you reply to an email message, it is useful to quote portions of the message that you are replying to in the body and reply to them one by one. Many emailers include an automatic quote option.
Most mailers allow you to attach other types of data files to your email message. These can include JPEG or GIF graphics, sound files, spreadsheets,word processing documents or virtually any kind of file that you can imagine. Some of the more common attachment types have been defined in a series of standard types called MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), that can sometimes be read and interpretted by the mailer itself, or a set of installed helper applications. Unknown content types can still be transferred, but you may have to tell the person at the other end how to process them to make them useful.
It's always nice to be polite and that sometimes isn't the same on the internet as it is in real life. For instance, don't type your messages or subject lines in all capital letters. In the early days of computing, many data entry people were taught to always type everything in uppercase because lowercase letters had different ASCII code equivalents than their uppercase counterparts and didn't sort correctly. It's the 90's and sorting problems have been solved. We have mixed case. Use it effectively and courteously. I CAN HEAR YOU. THERE'S NO NEED TO SHOUT!!! For a more complete discussion of netiquette, look here. Some people can get very abrasive in email and say things that they could never say directly to a person's face.This is generally a bad idea. A very wise person once told me that "Bad News should always be delivered in person." I have found that to be very true.
Most email softwares have certain basic functions built into them to manage your email. Here are a few:
Because email addresses must be absolutely correct or mail delivery will fail, most users choose to store frequently used addresses in an electronic address book that is part of the mailer. You can also create mail groups for your scout group, church choir, or witch coven.Most mailers have shortcuts to extract email addresses from messages in your in box and create more intuitive nicknames for them
Most emailers allow you to create a variety of mailboxes (or folders) to store your incoming and outgoing messaging in. This (and good subject lines) can have a lot to do with how easy it is for you to find an email message that you received a couple of weeks ago.
Many emailers can prescreen your mail for certain basic conditions (usually in the message header) and segregate it into specific mailboxes so that you can prioritize your reading habits.
Most emailers will allow you to create one or more signature files that can be appended automatically to the end of any outgoing mail that you create. These are highly recommended. Sort of an automatic electronic business card that can identify you to the reader even if your envelope gets seperated from your message body. Also, many people may print out a message that you send and give it to someone without email access. It's very useful for your messages to also contain USPS and telephone contact information as well. I also include my WWW URL in all of my .sig files. Generally, signature files should be short and sweet. Some folks draw complex ASCII pictures in their .sig files, but these waste paper on printing and get old really fast. The rule of thumb is to keep your .sig file to 6 lines or less. Some automated mail functions are set to ignore anything after they see two dash characters followed by a carriage return. This is less and less true, but I stil start all of my .sig files with that string. Here's an example of one of my .sig files that has a little song fragment in it as a "bonus."
--
Alan Rowoth |"You're going nowhere when you ride on the
carousel
Liverpool Public Library| And you may be strong,
310 Tulip Street | But what's the use of ringing a
bell?
Liverpool, NY 13088-4997| The tunnel of love might amuse you.
315.457.0310 x251 voice | And Noah's ark might confuse you.
315.453.7867 fax | Oh, let me take my chances on the Wall Of
Death."
alan@alanrowoth.com | -Richard Thompson "Wall Of
Death"
Most emailers will allow you to compose messages without being connected to the mail server or even the network. Usually you just tell the program that you want to "Create A New Message" and (often using your address book) you tell it who you want to send the message to, assign a meaningful Subject line and then type text into the message body. When the message is finished you queue it for transmission to the mail host. Many network attached computers are configured to send queue mail immediately so that users don't forget to send their outgoing messages, but it is generally more efficient to transfer messages manually.
Most mailers allow you to attach other types of files to an email message, either thru a menu command or often just by dragging and dropping the file onto the outgoing message. You should always include a bit of text in the message body as attachments with no message body confuse some email systems.
Most computers are not always on, connected to the internet, and waiting with enough available bandwidth to support a true peer to peer email system. Therefore, mail is sent and received thru mail server machines. That act like a PO box and recieve all of your incoming mail as it arrives, holding it for you until you "poll" the server and retrieve your mail. At LPL we use the Eudora email client to retrieve that mail, but you could use any one of several dozen clients that talk to the mail server thru the industry standard POP3 (Post Office Protocol) command structure. Some email clients automatically connect to the email server when you start them, but all offer a command to connect with the mail server and retrieve new messages while you are working. This command usually also sends any queued outbound mail.
Unless you have a sophisticated input filter, your new messages go into your Inbox. You have to open these messages, one by one, read them and decide what action they require you to take.
Once you have read an incoming message, often you will want to reply to the sender. The easiest way is normally to pick "Reply" from the message, but sometimes it's not that simple. If there were many recipients, you may instead want to "Reply to All", not just the original sender of the message. If you belong to an email based listserv or majordomo discussion group, you may sometimes want to reply to the individual who posted the message to the group. Other times you may want to reply to the whole group. Always check the recipient of a message reply (In the To: line) before you queue the message to be sent. Misaddressed mail, especially to discussion groups, is a frequent and embarrassing problem. Don't let it be a problem for you.
Often you may want to pass a message on, with or without comment to someone else who you feel needs the information. All mailers support the message forward option. Be aware though, that if that person responds the message, they are likely to respond to you instead of the original sender. Some emailers, like Eudora also offer the option to "Redirect" a message to a new recipient in such a way that their mailer will reply to the original sender.
Many email messages, once read, have no intrinsic value. Getting in the habit of deleting these immediately will make it that much easier for you to manage the mail that you must save.
Your feedback, additions, and corrections to this document are most welcome. Please email them to alan@alanrowoth.com
Copyright 1998 by Alan Rowoth, prepared for LPL Staff
Development Day.
This Document is always available on the WWW at http://www.alanrowoth.com/EmailBasics.html