Spam Is Not the Worst of It
Email etiquette and related gripesBy: The Essayist | 10Oct1999
Key: 1 = slightly annoying; S = heavy spam day
Definitions
Spelling Errors
Some people really should use a spell checker -- especially in the workplace. If you are a supervisor with a 5th grade education, you might consider using a grammar checker too. At work, I have an email folder full of literary proof that 'suit' is often interchangeable for 'dolt'. (I guess they have good people skills.) Almost every email client in existence in late 1999 has a spelling checker built into it -- even the free ones. Email tends, like conversational speech, to be sloppier than communications on paper. That's OK -- but even with email, shouldn't there be a limit on how oafish you want to appear? Upper Case
Words typed in all caps is 'heard' by the majority of Internet users as yelling. There may be parts of an email that need to be screamed, but probably not THE WHOLE EMAIL! Don't shout at people. It's impolite. No Subject
When I go in to work, there are usually over a hundred emails in my in-box. Many of these don't apply to me or my job -- but I'm on a bunch of distribution lists, so I get them anyway. I can usually eliminate half without opening them, based on the Subject field. Those without a Subject, I must open, since they might apply to me. I have seen a few email clients that will pop up a message asking for a subject, if you try to send without a subject. My solution: the software adds a default subject line of "Not important. Delete me." Delayed Reply
This is not all necessarily anybody's fault. I'll explain the nature of the problem first, then my solution -- which I expect an ISP or mail forwarding service to begin to implement as soon as their managers read this. Some of us practically live online. Others connect every few days, if that often. Some of us consider a telephone to be a highly optional instrument, suitable only for communicating with those who don't have anything better. Others give out their email address because they think it's cool to have one, but they don't actually use it much. (These are the people who call to tell me they've sent me an email, and usually they only used email to attach a document.) The problem is that we write email to the other sort, and wonder why we don't hear back for days. The solution: (listen up, ISP) create hostname prefixes -- just for email addresses -- that would indicate how often the user intends to check mail. Examples: sophie@weekends.zoloft.net, zebulon@daily.wacko.com, jebulon9@4Xdaily.whacko.com, fran007@dontbother.aol.com. Based on the email address of the person you want to contact, you would be able to decide whether telephone or pony express would be a better option. Fancy Text
Email began as a text-only medium, designed so anybody with a computer and connection to a network -- regardless of the system's power, operating system or email client -- would be able to communicate with anybody else on the planet. Most email software gives the user the ability to encode the text -- usually using HTML -- with bold, underline, italics, etc.
The problem is that not everybody uses software that recognizes fancy formatting -- nor do they necessarily want to use it. You send: No Reply
Not every email requires a response. But if you are a business, and you get email from someone outside the office (potential customer, customer with a question, etc.), you should respond quickly. Even just an automated reply: "The message was received and we'll get back to you shortly if a personal reply is required" is enough. Besides being polite, it's just a good business practice. How many times do you send a tip to CNET's tips@news.com and never hear back from them -- not even an auto-reply -- before you go looking for an email address for ZDNet? If I get no reply to an email written for other than professional reasons, I usually assume it is an extremely Delayed Reply. Reply All
I see this in the workplace, daily. Some manager sends an email to everybody:
From: Swampy@company.com Inevitably, there will be a dozen replies like this:
From: Bonehead@company.com …and then…
From: Yutz@company.com If Bonehead and Yutz want to communicate support to Sacco, that's comradely and all. But why share this with the rest of the company? Do they really think we need more email? Also see Multi-forwarded Mail. One of the worst incidents I've witnessed -- although it was not company-wide -- was when a person emailed his department of approximately a hundred, asking for the unknown person who had borrowed some test equipment from his bench to return it. Dimwit1 Replied All that he hadn't seen it. Dimwit2 Replied All to remind Dimwit1 that his email shouldn't have been a Reply All. My solution: When the Reply All button is clicked, the email client should automatically add text to the body of the email at a random spot that reads, "BY THE WAY, I AM AN IMBECILE! -- SIGNED [the person who Replied All]" If the respondent really means to Reply All, s/he will find and delete the additional text. If s/he doesn't mean to Reply All, the truth of the added text will be demonstrated. The point would be to motivate people to cogitate on whether they really want to encumber All of us with their comments. Prodigious Forwarding
A couple of my correspondents are on several joke- or story-a-day mailing lists and apparently assume that I would join these lists if I just knew how. Add to this the urban legends they forward and my intake of junk mail from these sources is worse than spam -- since a few of these emails might include a personal message from the sender, so I dare not set up a bozo filter. It is hard for me to know how to respond without hurting their feelings -- especially since they are neophytes and probably don't realize the volume of email an old-timer gets. I have considered "returning the favor" by mail-bombing a bunch of junk back, but I suspect they would eat it up with a spoon. The point is, don't assume that other people you know want to see all the interesting stories you receive in your in-box. It is understandable if you occasionally run across a real pearl you want to share with someone but not all of them -- and not every day. One possible response would be to save all that email for awhile, then send it all back at once. I'm keeping that option open. Urban Legends & Virus Warnings
Urban Legends are somewhat entertaining the first time they come around; forgivable the second -- but not the seventh time, when they've been circulating for months or years. They continue, obviously, because there are always new users who haven't read them before and think they are new to everybody. Given all the Urban Legend and Virus Hoax information available all across the Web, it is a shame that users are willing to damage their own credibility by believing them. I must assume they do believe them, since they encumber my in-box with this trash without checking the stories out. The Unquiet Collective has had some fun writing one or two new urban legends -- and may again -- but once a story is listed in a dozen urban legend lists, that should pretty much end their circulation -- in a better world, anyway. The primary annoyance of these emails is not necessarily the message but the format by which they are sent. More about this under Multi-forwarded Mail. Bandwidth HogsMany email users don't seem to grasp that thoughtlessness leads to a waste of bandwidth and time for other users. When your recipient logs onto the Internet and checks his/her mail, s/he should not have to download a 50K message to read 3K of content. This is even more important if your recipient has a slow modem and/or bad phone lines and/or lives in Europe or elsewhere where they pay by the minute for a connection.Bandwidth Hogs: Attachments
The email header takes up minimal amount of bandwidth. A few paragraphs of message takes a little more. If you asked for an image or audio file to be emailed to you, that's a different story -- but people commonly attach files that would have worked just fine as plain text. Example: For a work project, I was recently emailed a list consisting of approximately a dozen lines, each containing one name and a date next to it. None of the text had special formatting, i.e., it wasn't in a table, none of it had to be bold or bright orange or some eye-candy font. This list was emailed as an attached Microsoft Word document. It hogged bandwidth -- which isn't necessarily a problem at work -- but it also required me to open another application (MSWord) just to read those dozen lines. Another problem with attachments -- particularly outside the work environment -- is that not every Internet user has the same software applications, or even the same operating system. If special formatting is not necessary to the message, send it as plain text in the body of the email. The whole world isn't Windoze. Your correspondent's word processor of choice might be WordPerfect on a Macintosh, or Applixware on Linux, or Emacs on FreeBSD. In short, don't attach any file to an email unless you ask permission first. Bandwidth Hogs: Attachments: Executables
With all of the known viruses floating around in cyberspace, anybody that double-clicks on an attachment that ends with .exe will get what s/he deserves. Besides taking up bandwidth, many executables are hazardous to your computer. Delete any email with one. Not many months ago, merely reading an email could not transfer a virus, trojan horse or other exploit to your computer. If you use Microsoft's Outlook email client, your world is less secure. Opening an email in Outlook can run ActiveX scripts designed for all manner of nefarious purposes. But it sure is user friendly, right? Bandwidth Hogs: Multi-forwarded Mail
>>>>Hey! Check this out. When forwarding email (if you must), you should also remove headers from previous mailings -- including the email addresses -- if any. Also see Exposed Addresses. Bandwidth Hogs: Chaining and Quoting
When users reply back and forth to an email, it is often common practice to leave the entire previous email at the bottom of the reply -- as in the Reply All example above. It is also an unnecessary use of bandwidth. When responding to a specific part of the original email, include just that section -- and delete the rest from your reply. By the same token, you should leave the quoted section intact with your reply. It can be irritating to read a response to something you wrote -- especially if the reply is delayed -- and not be able to see exactly what you wrote to which they are replying. Bandwidth Hogs: Exposed Addresses
There are fundamentals about addressing email that too many users either don't know, or are too lazy to care about -- and not just still-damp neophytes either. Every email client I have ever encountered requires something in the To: field. When addressing email to several people, assume that the information is written to the people in the To: field. If the email is also for the information of others -- but they are not necessarily expected to act on it and/or you don't expect a reply from them -- put their addresses in the CC: field. 'CC' stands for 'carbon copy'. All recipients will see who the message is To: and who has been CC'd and if any of them Reply All, 'All' means those in the To: and CC: fields. If you want others to read the email without revealing their addresses to the To: and CC: recipients, place their addresses in the BCC: field. BCC stands for 'blind carbon copy'. A Reply All from To: or CC: recipients will not go to those originally in the BCC: field, since BCC'd addresses are hidden from the To: and CC: recipients. [Also, watch your To's and CC's when replying. Don't continue to include people if the message becomes a private conversation.] When addressing email to more than several recipients (you pick your own cut-off; mine is usually ten or more) -- and if you don't expect (or want) them to be able to Reply to anybody but you, there are at least two ways to hide their email addresses from each other. One, of course, is to put them all in the BCC field. Since email clients require something in the To: field, you can put your own address there. One problem with this method is that so few people are aware of the BCC option or its uses, they may think you are sending the email solely to them. This can be touchy, depending on the message. If you refer (in the message) to the fact that there are a lot of recipients, it might be more palatable to your recipients, (i.e., they are less likely to take it personally). Another method of hiding email addresses is to create a distribution list. This should be an option with all email clients (I'm not certain), although I know it's much easier with some software than with others. With Pegasus, I can create a distribution list containing fifty recipients from my address book, and send my mail to this list name (Example: "All of you dopes") nearly as easily as I could place fifty addresses in the BCC field. Once created, a distribution list can be edited (to add or remove addresses) and used again. Especially with emails that are forwarded over and over, users who don't follow these practices create two problems:
This is not an imaginary fear. I have several email addresses: some of them I publish on the Net; some of them I give to acquaintances. The spam in my inbox increases after every incidence of somebody forwarding trash email to me and a hundred others -- with addresses showing. When getting these emails in the past, I have attempted to perform education and damage control. I have extracted all the emails and sent a broad reply (i.e., I spammed them) on the dangers of exposed addresses (and, depending on the email, the wisdom of checking out urban legends or virus warnings). Some of the replies (when they do) have been positive, along the lines of "Thank you for letting us know about this" and "I'll add your urban legend URL to my bookmarks." A few of the replies have been otherwise. A recent one: "For one thing, I never sent you any e-mail so where do you get off even contacting me? MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS !!!!!" Since he obviously just didn't get it and -- mostly -- since he was hostile, I decided to give him an object lesson on what it's like when all the real spammers know your address. (Hey, when you've been using the Net as long as I have, you know how to get things done.) I hope he's enjoying all his new email. (Also see Flaming.) Pessimal Combinations
Example: An email that has been multi-forwarded already, with all addresses showing -- including yours (or mine) -- with a message containing many lines of >>>>>>>>>> and an attached executable file. Solution: Send the URL of this page to your friends and it will never happen to you. Flaming
If you flame someone -- especially in an email list -- they'll flame back or worse. It seems to be self-correcting. Resources
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