EMAIL - A Tutorial

by Dale Atchison


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Electronic Mail, or Email:  We all use it.  It's the main reason most of us bought a computer in the first place, so we could share jokes, music files, and pictures of the grandchildren (or of half-naked strangers, depending on our age) with friends and family.  But, how many of us know how to use email courteously, safely, and efficiently?  Excuse me if I step on any toes here, but in my experience, the answer is "Not very many of us at all!"

Think for a minute how annoyed you get when you receive an email message that requires you to 'drill down' through half a dozen or more attachments to get to the actual message, be it text or pictures.  Then think just a little harder, and remember that you usually just click on Forward to send that monstrosity on to your own mailing list - they'll see every layer you did, plus one more!  Ouch!

And how many email addresses have you seen of people who received the message before you?  They're most likely friends of friends of friends, but six or seven generations down in the forwarding morass, and there's little chance they're someone you know, and certainly not someone whose email address you should be sending on to your mailing list.  But you probably do, did, and will, if you just click on Forward.

In this article, I'm going to try and lay out a safe, courteous, and efficient plan for sending email.  There's nothing you can do to fix how poorly your friends and family handle the stuff they send you, but you can at least keep from adding to the mess, and set a good example at the same time.

1.  TEXT vs.  HTML.  First and foremost, there is seldom a good reason to send HTML email.  That's email that lets you choose the size, color, and font of your email text, as well as embed pictures and sound in a message.  When that's something you just have to do for the message to make sense, or just to express the feeling or idea you were sending it for in the first place, go ahead and use HTML, but MOST of the time, email should be sent in plain text format.  Text messages are a tiny fraction of the size of HTML messages, meaning they upload from your computer and download to the recipients' computers in a fraction of the time - your friends who still have dial-up will thank you for not bogging down their downloads.
  • Sending in HTML just so you can use 'smileys' is just plain wrong!  I know one or two people who actually LIKE receiving all those stupid grinning graphical characters; I ask them politely to refrain from sending any to me.  Both Hotmail and Incredimail allow you to send email without HTML codes; sorry, but I can't give any further guidance than, "look for it", because I don't use either program.  (BTW, if you're using Incredimail, you're taking a chance with all your personal data - most of us think it's spyware.)
  • When you want to embed pictures in a message, and the placement and order matters, you don't get a choice:  use HTML, but make sure the end result will be worth the annoyance and extra download time to the people you're sending to.  The same reasoning applies if you want to attach an HTML 'signature' file:  it won't display properly at the end of a plain text email, so if the signature is worth the hassle, use HTML for the message, as well.  (Of course, you could always ATTACH the HTML signature file to the end of a plain text email (see paragraph 6.), and you'd get the best of both worlds:  small message size, with the attendant fast upload and download times, and just one double-click necessary for the recipient to see your HTML masterpiece at the end.)
  • For most of us, it's a good idea to set Plain Text as the default mail sending format.  Here's how to do it from within Outlook Express:  Tools » Options » Send » in the Mail Sending Format area, click the Plain Text 'radio button'.  Click the HTML Settings button, put a check mark next to Send Pictures With Messages, and remove the check mark next to Indent Message On Reply; click OK.  Click the Plain Text Settings button, remove the check mark next to Indent the Original Text…; click OK, then OK again to save all changes.
  • And if someone sends you an HTML email, and you feel the need to respond to it, PLEASE remember to change the Format to Plain Text - they might have had a legitimate reason to send you a large file, but there's no good reason to send the same large file back to them just to say "Thanks, that was funny."  While in the Reply window, click on Format » Plain Text to lose the embedded pictures, sounds, colors, and fonts.  And anytime you reply to a message, HTML or not, only include as much of the original message as absolutely necessary to remind the person why you're replying.
2.  Layers of Attachments.  No matter how many layers you have to drill through to get to a message, when you forward it, the actual message (text or HTML) should be the only thing the recipient sees.  Using Outlook Express, this is very easy:  don't click Forward while looking at the top layer of the message, but wait until you're looking at the last layer, the actual message; clicking Forward at this point should open a new message window with ONLY the 'meat' of the message displayed.  (At least, that's how it works at my house.)

If you're using AOL, CompuServe, YahooMail, or one of the other web-based email clients, it's only a little more complicated:
  • Don't click on Forward, EVER!  Instead, while viewing the meat of the message you want to send on to others, highlight everything you want to forward by left-clicking just to the left of the first word or picture, holding the mouse button down, and dragging to just right of the last word or picture.
  • Right-click anywhere in the highlighted area, and left-click Copy.
  • Open a New Message, right-click in the blank message body, and left-click Paste.
  • Send that message to your friends and family; try not to send it to the person who sent it to you - that denotes a whole new set of problems that I can't help you with.
  • (Most of the web-based clients don’t give you the option of 'inline text' for forwarding - it's Send As Attachment or no deal - another reason to use a POP3 client like Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, or Thunderbird.)
3.  Addresses.  You have been trusted with the email addresses of your friends and family.  Please don't betray that trust by sharing the address with the world.  You may only send a message on to one or two trusted correspondents, but you have no way of knowing how many they will send it to , and so on, and so on.  How many generations down the road before your maiden Aunt's email address appears in the Inbox of someone who makes his living ripping off seniors?  How many times will a message be forwarded before your daughter's or niece's address shows up where a pedophile can use it to pretend he's a trusted friend of a trusted friend?  This sounds paranoid - it isn't.  Hide every email address you use from every other email address you use, by putting all recipients' addresses in the BCC: line; no one but the author of the message ever sees those addresses - they're not even hidden in the headers that an administrator at the receiving end can look at (the administrator at your ISP [the sending end] can probably see them, but he or she sees everything you do online, anyway - you gotta trust somebody).  If your email client won't allow you to send a message with no address in the To: line, address it to yourself, with all the real recipients safely hidden in the BCC: line.  In Outlook Express, the BCC: line isn't displayed by default.  You can make it show up by clicking on the To: button in a message (just left of the To: address line), selecting an address from your Address Book, and clicking on the BCC: button to add the address.
  • The only time it is appropriate to have a 'pile' of addresses all visible to all recipients, either in the To: or the Cc: lines, is when you know they all know each other, you're pretty sure none of them would object to your sharing the address with any of the rest of them, and the message is of a nature that leaves you very sure there would be no reason for anyone to forward it.
  • If you receive a message with other people's email addresses visible, remove them all before sending the message on.  There's no sense in compounding someone else's error by forwarding the message 'as is'.  So what if one or two people might receive a message twice because you or a friend 'downline' didn't see that they'd already gotten it?  That's a small price to pay for protecting your loved ones from predators.  If they see a duplicate message show up, and recognize the Subject: line, they can erase it just as easily before they read it as they could afterward.
4.  The Subject: Line.  Which brings me to the next topic:  Always Type Something Descriptive in the Subject: Line.  It's only common courtesy.  When your friend who never cleans out his Inbox wants to find the message you sent him about your new Fender Stratocaster, it will help immensely if the Subject: line includes the word "Stratocaster".
  • "News From the Bellsouth Portal" or such is never adequate; news about what?  If your Subject: line was filled in automatically by an online script (meaning you pressed a "share this with a friend" button), change it manually rather than adding to it - a super-long subject line will be ignored by most folks.
  • And please remove all those Fw: and/or Re: prefixes on the Subject: line!  They're just clutter.  If you're actually replying to a message, it's okay to have one (and only one) Re: before the Subject: line; likewise, if this is a legitimate Fw: (someone sent me this, and I think you should see it, too), one and only one Fw: can appear before the actual subject.  Jokes, pictures, online stories, and such should usually just have the subject, no Re: and no Fw: .  Makes for a cleaner message list in the recipient's Inbox.
5.  Clean it up.  If you receive a message full of >>>>>> symbols, remove them before passing it on.  The instructions in paragraph 1. will prevent you from adding another > or two, but why not go the 'extra mile' and remove the earlier senders' mistakes by removing them all?  There is a program called EmailStripper that will do this for you, but I just use Notepad.  (In Win 98 or ME, you'll need to use WordPad - the Replace function didn't exist in Notepad until Win 2000.)  Here's how, using Notepad (WordPad commands are the same, except for the obvious difference of calling the other program):
  • While viewing the want to clean up and forward, click on the Forward button.
  • Press Ctrl-A on your keyboard )or click Edit » Select All in the menu) to highlight the entire message.
  • Right-click any place within the highlighted area, and left-click Cut.
  • Click on Start » Run » Notepad » OK.
  • Right-click anywhere on the blank page, and left-click Paste.  There's your text.
  • While the text is still highlighted (if you lose the highlighting, just press Ctrl-A on your keyboard to get it back), press Ctrl-H.
  • In the Find What:  field of the Find and Replace dialog box, type a > symbol, followed by the largest number of empty spaces you can see in the highlighted text; leave the Replace With: field blank, and click Replace All.
  • After the replacements have been made, click once at the right-hand end of the Find What: field, press the Backspace key, then click Replace All again.
  • Repeat this process, reducing the length of the Find What: string by one character at a time, until there's no text left in the Find What: field.
  • Click the Cancel button in the Find and Replace dialog box to close it.
  • Click Edit » Select All » Cut to put the cleaned-up text 'on the clipboard'.
  • Right-click back in your blank email message, and left-click Paste.  You should be left with a cleaned-up version of the original email message, ready to address and Send.
I realize this explanation seems long and probably convoluted, but it took much longer to tell you than it takes to do; once you've done it once or twice, all the actions become automatic, and each message takes just a few seconds to clean up.

Cleaning up an HTML message is a little bit different.  Instead of >> marks, some HTML messages that have been improperly forwarded have a series of blue vertical bars at the left-hand side of the screen.  (We already set your copy of Outlook Express to not add to this mess back in paragraph 1.)  Remove the bars thusly:
  • Left-click just to the left of the first character or picture in the HTML message that you want to forward, and hold the button down while you drag the mouse cursor to just right of the last character or picture that you want.  You should now have a large highlighted area just to the right of the last vertical blue bar on the left.
  • Right-click anywhere in the highlighted area, and left-click Copy.
  • Open a New Message window by clicking on Create Mail.
  • Right-click in the blank message window, and left-click Paste.  There's your original message, minus all the blue bars and extra addresses.
  • Address the message (see paragraph 3.), add an appropriate Subject: line (see paragraph 4.), and click Send.
6.  Attachments.  You can attach any file to an email message.  (Some ISP's may not let your recipients receive executable files; if you know that to be the case, ZIP your .exe files and other executables before attaching them.)  Pictures attached to a plain text email will appear just below the text in most email clients.  You won't see it while composing the message, but if you look at the message in your Outbox before sending it, it will (hopefully) look just like it will when your friends receive it.  Attach a file by clicking on the Attach button in a New Message window, navigating to the file(s) you want to attach, and clicking the Attach button in the Insert Attachment dialog box; you can attach more than one file at a time, just highlight all the files you want to attach using the Shift or Control keys, or by drawing a box around a group of files in the dialog box.
  • If you attach files you created on your computer, be sure the people you're sending to have the necessary programs to open the files installed on their computers.  Everyone has WordPad or its Mac equivalent; convert any Word documents to Word for Windows Version 6 using the Save As command from the Word menu so they can see your work.  Programs like Photoshop and Print Shop use their own file formats by default, but if you'll check their menus, you'll find you can export any files you've created as JPEG or PDF files - again, everyone can read those.
  • Sometimes, you'll see a picture in an incoming email, but it will show up as a red X when you try and forward it.  This can happen for any of several reasons, but one of the most likely is that you're using some sort of SpamBlocker software that won't let you forward 'web-pix':  pictures that were never actually in the email you received, but live somewhere out on the Internet where a link in your email can retrieve and display them on command.  Web-pix are sometimes harmless, but they are also sometimes used by spammers to target you for unwanted and annoying commercial email.  Forward these pictures (if you must) by right-clicking the picture in your original received email, selecting Save Picture As… and saving the picture on your desktop.  Then, when you're editing the New or Forwarded Message, highlight each of the red X'es in turn, and click on Insert » Picture in the menu; click on Browse, choose the saved picture from your desktop, and click Open.  Once you've sent the message, you can delete all the temporarily-stored pictures from your desktop.
  • Occasionally, you'll receive an attachment you can't open.  If it's a proprietary file format like PSP or PSD, write the person who sent it to you and ask them to send you a JPEG or PDF of the attachment.  If the file attachment says it is an .EML file, save it to your desktop, and double-click to open in Outlook Express (this is usually only a problem for people who are reading mail online, but the mail was sent from an Outlook Express user using the POP3 protocol - you don't have to understand that last bit, just take my word for it).  If the attachment says it's a .TXT file, but Notepad shows gibberish characters when you double-click it, try saving it to your desktop, changing the extension to .EML, and double-click so Outlook Express can open what is most likely an HTML email.  If double-clicking doesn't cause Outlook Express to open, try highlighting the saved file, holding down the Shift key on your keyboard while you right-click the highlighted file, and choosing Open With; select Outlook Express from the drop-down list that appears.  If Outlook Express isn't in the drop-down list, it's probably not installed on your computer.  Go to Control Panel » Add/Remove Programs » Windows Setup (or Add/Remove Windows Components) and select Outlook Express; click OK and follow the prompts to install it.
7.  Hoaxes.  You're going to receive email messages nearly every day telling you about some heinous or heroic thing done by someone you'd never have expected it from.  Please go to Snopes.com and check it out before sending it on - 99% of the time, these stories are at least exaggerations, if not outright lies.  (Jane Fonda did visit North Vietnam during the war, but there's no evidence she got anyone beaten or killed by betraying them to their captors.)  Please don't add to the Internet clutter by propagating lies and half-truths.  Just type a few pertinent words from the email you received into the Search box at Snopes, and they'll give you a list of current stories on the Web on that subject, and tell you how much (if any) of it is true.

8.  File Size.  I routinely receive huge video and audio files from people I really like, but I don't have time to wait for the downloads, even at DSL speed, and I sure don't have the hard drive space to store every movie floating around out there - I delete them from the Verizon email server before they're ever downloaded to my computer.  Make sure you have a very good reason for sending any email larger than half a megabyte (500kb).  If in doubt, err on the side of courtesy:  send a link to the online copy of the original file in a plain text email, say in the Subject: line that it's a movie or audio link (give the subject of the clip here, too), and say in the message body how large the file is, even if it's just in relative terms - "it takes three to four minutes to download, but it was worth it," or words to that effect.


I hope I've helped a little, or at least not added to the confusion.  If I've created more questions than answers, please email them to me by clicking the link below.  You'll get a personal reply, and I'll publish a follow-up to this article in an attempt to clarify the issue for anyone else who might need it.



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