Fr. Frog's E-mail Philosophy
In my humble opinion e-mail is one of the
greatest things since sliced bread. However, it seems to get pretty badly
abused by many people. Herewith are my thoughts on the subject.
- There is no reason for sloppy spelling, grammar, and
punctuation in messages you send. Use your spelling checker and proof your
message before you click the send button.
- Don't say anything in an e-mail you wouldn't say in
public. It is NOT secure.
- DON'T TYPE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS--its the equivalent
of shouting. don't type in all lower case as it is hard to read.
- Unless absolutely necessary, don't use formatted text,
fancy fonts, or graphical "smileys." They do nothing for
information transfer and they make your message files larger. Plain
text messages are much smaller in size and everyone can view them.
- When forwarding a message, you should the delete the
headers and other unnecessary parts of the original message. There is nothing as
annoying as wading through 10 pages of headers and useless replies from
other people. Plus, leaving all the previous addresses intact helps spammers
gather addresses.
- Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do
not use the "To" or "CC" fields for adding e-mail
addresses. Always use the BCC (blind carbon copy) field for listing the
e-mail addresses. This way the people you send to will only see their
own e-mail address, and it protects against address harvesting.
- Don't forward jokes, pictures, and the like to everyone
in your address book. Getting unsolicited garbage is very annoying,
especially to folks with slow dialup connections or who normally get lots of
normal email. It is a polite thing to ask the intended recipient before you
forward things to them unless you know for sure that they want you to.
- If you use e-mail be sure to check for messages on a
regular basis. It's really annoying to send something to a person that you
need a reply from and then.... nothing. You check your postal mail daily--do
the same with your email.
- If you are a member of a group or forum do not forward
messages to those outside of the group without first obtaining permission
from the post's author.
- If you are a member of a group or forum and you change
the subject of a posting, remember to change the "subject" line of
your message to reflect the change of topic.
- Be sure that your email program is properly setup to
show your correct return/reply to address otherwise folks won't be able to
respond to you.
- Be sure you have up-to-date antivirus and anti-spyware
software installed on your computer, and either set them to update
automatically or check for updates the first thing when you start your
computer. Many vendors now send daily updates.
- Before you forward any warnings, announcements, virus
alerts, or similar messages that are floating about, check them out before
you forward them. Most of them are junk mail that's been circulating for
years. Just about everything you receive in an email that is questionable
can be checked out a Snopes. (Actually check it! Some spam now claim
"it was verified with Snopes.") Just go to www.snopes.com . If it's not
legitimate, don't pass it on.
- Don't open attachments from unknown senders.
Please email comments or questions to Fr. Frog by
clicking here.
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Updated 2007-06-22