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.

• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• Watch your attachment sizes.  Modern high mega-pixel cameras create huge files--often 5 - 10 Mb in size which can choke many mail servers and tie up someone's dialup line for a long time.  Even in this day and age not everyone has a super speed connection.  Unless told otherwise, scale your pictures using a paint program to about 800 x 600 pixels which makes file size manageable.
  
• 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 are a member of a group or forum do not forward messages to anyone 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 at Snopes or at antivirus software vendor's sites.. (Actually check it!  Some spam now claim "it was verified with Snopes.") Just go to www.snopes.com or similar sites (although there are some questionable things on Snopes). 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.

| Back to Fr. Frog's Home Page |

Updated 2011-12-04