If you haven't already done so, please read our June, 1997 column on Summer Safeguards. It could save you time, effort and money -- really.

et·i·quette: the conduct or procedure required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be observed in social or official life

At the conclusion of a talk on Technology at the Millennium, a member of the audience stood to ask "Do you mean email will replace regular mail?" When I replied affirmatively, murmurs of "Really, really..." and gasps of "He's crazy!" rose from the assemblage like dust from the crater of a cannonball. But that was over a year ago. Today, all but the Luddites, comatose, and van Winkles among us know email is here to stay. And that raises another concern -- how to do it right.

Like using the telephone, using email is not something they teach you in school. It's too important to be covered by scholastic dictum! So our brief treatment of email etiquette comes from experience -- the best teacher².

Getting noticed.  With everyone ducking left and right to avoid incoming SPAM (junk email), it's important to make sure your email gets noticed and gets read. Before it's opened, there are only two clues to its value: the sender and the subject.

• Send under your own name from your main account.  If, like many of us, you have multiple email accounts, some under aliases, remember to send email from your main, identifiable account. You may think of yourself as purrcat, but the rest of us will delete email from purrcat@hotmail.com as unwelcome, probably pornographic trash. Get opened, not deleted. Send as jsmith@aol.com.
• Use a short, descriptive and unique subject.  SPAMmers routinely send mail with no subject and with the subject line packed with "grab" words like free and millions and phrases like You've got to see this! and, of course, with lots of extraneous punctuation -- !!!!!!!!!!!!!. To make sure your email is read, make the subject short, simple and descriptive. And don't use the same subject over and over! Multiple emails from the same sender with the same subject look like mistakes, not mail to be noticed.

Getting read.  There are a few folks out there who claim to have been using email since before the Egyptians stopped using hieroglyphics, but for most of us email is a new toy -- a sports car to be tested, an evening gown to be modeled. So most recipients are pretty tolerant of e-pranks. Most of us.

• Content counts!  Some of us have stopped opening mail from senders whose primary content is jokes, virus warnings, chain letters, and, heaven help us all, dollops of canned spirituality! McLuhan to the contrary, it is the message not the medium. If most of the time you have nothing to say, most of us will stop reading your email. Really.
• Format doesn't!  Email is relaxed, casual, come as your are. It's okay if you can't spell, punctuate, or your grammar is beneath contempt. Like Popeye, you are what you are -- and we'll all love you for it. (You weren't expecting that, now were you?)

Not getting red.  Although email typed ALL IN CAPITALS is considered shouting, we'll even forgive you that (perhaps you haven't found the shift key yet).

• But don't play with the colors, sizes and fonts. You may think you sent an email that said LOOK!, but since all email systems are not created equal, what you really sent was <bold> <font=comic sans ms> <large> <color=red> Look! </bold> <font=times new roman> <med> <color=black>.

Pretty annoying, eh what? And that was just one word! So instead of tripping the light fontastic, let your words convey your meaning and emotions. And, if you need help with the latter, there are always the cutesy but effective emoticons. :-)

Not bombing.  Few among us are truly vicious or malicious, but more than a few are unwitting terrorists who bomb their unsuspecting correspondents with megabyte attachments.

• Ask before sending large attachments (or emails).  Some email systems, like the one offered by AOL, let the recipient decide if and when to download attachments, but most don't. And some systems have relatively generous storage allowances, but some don't. Before sending anything over about 20-30 kilobytes in size -- like photographs, email "postcards", reports, manuscripts -- it's good practice to make sure your correspondent won't be inconvenienced.

Consider how you'd feel if I sent you an email you weren't expecting with ten large photos attached. Perhaps I sent it at a time when you were waiting for an important email from someone else. You'd "check mail" and find yourself waiting half an hour or more to get past my photos to see if the important email had arrived, and depending on your mail system, you might not be able to do anything else on your PC while my photos downloaded, and, when the download was complete, you'd discover that my silly photos now occupied what had been the last few megabytes of free space on your hard drive. You see why I call large, unexpected emails/attachments bombs?

Being a mensch.  Just as most of us are courteous drivers, most of us would be civil netizens if we knew the "rules of the road". So here are a few final tips on driving the email superhighway.

• Acknowledge each email.  It's good practice to acknowledge each email as you receive it, even if you don't have time to act on it at the moment. This takes seconds to compose and send: "Got your email about Mike's coin collection. I'll give you my thoughts about it in a few days." Ditto for this: "Prefer to discuss this on the phone; I'll call you tomorrow."
• Check your email twice a day.  What makes email fun is that it's easy, informal, and quick, with an emphasis on quick. Don't check your mail frequently and the quick is gone, demoting you from a treat to a treatment.
• Keep a separate email address for "genuine" correspondence.  With so many sources of free email available, everyone should be able to maintain one account just for correspondence, while using another for mailing lists, contests, etc. A separate "correspondence" account means you can check it frequently -- and pleasantly -- without having to sort through lower priority notices, newsletters, catalogs, advertisements and SPAM.
• Quote judiciously.  When responding to email, quoting the statement or question that you're addressing is a thoughtful way to refresh your correspondent's memory and to provide your email with the immediacy of a live conversation. (Most email software provides for automatic quoting, marking quoted lines with a special character, usually a ">".) However, please note that quoting can be overdone. If you fail to delete irrelevant passages when quoting, the net effect is annoying, not polite!
• Advertise your account changes.  Email is free so it only costs a few minutes of your time to tell your correspondents when you change email addresses, or block incoming mail, or post a vacation notice, etc. Telling them yourself instead of letting them find out "from the postmaster" means your correspondents won't spend precious time creating email that can't be delivered.

No awards. You won't turn into a prince if you follow our suggested email etiquette -- although we know your friends will think highly of you -- and you won't turn into a frog if you don't. And maybe they won't erect a monument in the park in your honor, but they won't be hunting you with a howitzer either. And your email will get noticed, will get read, and might even get answered now and then.

1. PC Tips is an irregularly-issued column produced by Installations Plus+ for those of its clients who don't pretend to power user status.  You are welcome to submit suggestions for future columns to the PC Tips Suggestion Box.

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2. We plan to make this article permanently available online and from our email autoresponder. If you have additional etiquette suggestions, we'd be glad to consider them for updates to this article.

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• The November, 1996 PC Tips on Laser Printers
• The December, 1996 PC Tips on Buying a Personal Computer
• The January, 1997 PC Tips on Computer Viruses
• The February, 1997 PC Tips on Deleting Files and DLL Problems
• The March, 1997 PC Tips on the "Hole" in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Windows Error Messages
• The April, 1997 PC Tips on Frequently Asked Questions and Their Answers
• The May, 1997 PC Tips on More Frequently Asked Questions and Answers
• The June, 1997 PC Tips on Summer Safeguards
• The July, 1997 PC Tips on Modem Update and Free Speech & the Internet
• The August, 1997 PC Tips on "Windows 93", the World Wide Wait, and an H-P Printer Problem
• The September, 1997 PC Tips on Summer Safeguards, Windows 95 Registry, and Software Upgrades
• The April, 1998 PC Tips on Modems (56.6 kbs, ISDN, Cable), Scanners, Free Email
• The May, 1998 PC Tips on Backups: A Special Report
• The June, 1998 PC Tips on Installing New Software
• The July, 1998 PC Tips Am I Ready for a Wesite?
• "Highway Robbery," Nathaniel Wice's TIME Digital Magazine undercover investigation of sleazy computer "salesmanship", which appeared in the November, 1996 issue
• "Does Not Compute," Michael Maren's New York Magazine article on selecting a PC repair shop, which appeared in the November, 1996 issue

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