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	Q: What's the truth about email? ... The odds that the person you are emailing is sitting there at his desk this exact moment, waiting for an email to show up, and will respond within seconds is.... not very good. Not good at all. ... A good reason why someone hasn't responded yet is that they have a life, job, children, or a favorite program is on TV. Email is just like any other form of communication, people will get back to you when they can. ... Your newbie status will shine thru the moment you write to someone and ask if they got your email an hour ago. If he has not answered you yet, think of your phone answering machine at home. When you get home to listen to messages, don't you hear all 12 from Mom at once, asking you if you got the previous messages? My favorite one is the last... "I guess you are not home." Derr. ... If you wrote to a business, or a stranger, and haven't heard back in a day or two, write again and ask if your first email got caught in their spam folder and they never saw it. Then go have a beer while you think about how your second email is going to bypass their spam program if the first one didn't. (More about automated spam programs later.) ... Using an email to your local police in place of a 911 call for emergency service is really stupid. ... If you are emailing an important insurance paper to your doctor's office and there is no time issue involved, that's fine. Put a receipt on that one email so you'll know they got it by the date and time it was opened in their office. Receipts are wonderful for a working project with someone whose internet provider is flaky as a corn cereal and you have to know that every step of the project is being worked on at the same time with the newest version. Do NOT use receipts all the time. Some folks have to click on a popup screen to agree to send every receipt from their email system. If you send an email to a friend, they will let you know if they don't get it. Go have another beer, you still aren't "getting this" are you? ... Never, ever, ever, ever, ever send any email you get in, on to your friends without checking it at Truth Or Fiction first. Click on the Search link at the top banner and look for your email subject matter. Forwarding on an emergency email about a child who wasn't even missing 10 years ago when the email started being circulated, or any of the old wives tales, warnings, offers, or other bogus emails, will make you look silly at best. It'll get you yelled at in online groups. Your dog will run away from embarrassment. Young children will point and laugh on the street. ... Email is not a chat screen. CU may be fine for "texting," but in an email it makes you look like a 12 year old middle school dropout. While we're on the subject... use the spell checker. Making the occasional silly is one thing and no one cares. People who write serious emails often are going to be judged by the look and content of their email, as well as the ugly, or lack of a good sig file. ... Email and web pages are forever. Remember when your Dad told you to never commit anything to writing because it can come back and bite you in the rear later? He was right. The "web" is a living, breathing, growing critter that has an incredible memory and it wants to stomp you into the ground. It will ruin you in any way possible. It could use a newbie who makes a mistake and writes to someone else with your note still there below on that same email form. It can use you when you scan an email quickly and respond thinking you are writing back to one person when it's really someone else. It will cause us to hit the wrong addy in our own addy books when writing to one person and in reality sending the email to someone else. It will take private email and post it on web pages that are forever searchable, and old copies of a page, how it looked years ago, are retrievable. Removing a web page from the web doesn't mean it is gone. ... When sending an email, it comes FROM you and goes TO the person you are writing to. ... If you are sending an email to a lot of folks, send it FROM you and TO you, add the other folks to the BCC line. This way everyone responds only to you and not to everyone causing a chain reaction of everyone answering everything that everyone says. This mistake will lead you into a downward spiral of hundreds of emails telling you to use the BCC line and fighting over whatever the innocent topic was in the first place. By the time Joe checks his email in 4 days and finds 300 emails all with the same subject line... you lost a friend. The Pope himself would respond that he hates sunny days just to jump in and argue with the guy who told someone else that they are stupid. ... Everyone getting an email FROM and TO you, will not know who else got the original email. They will also know that there is no chance of this email being forwarded onto others and picked up for harvesting by evil email spammers. ... When is an email exchange over? If the email is with 2 people or a BCC group of 100... if there is no question posed to you or everyone in the group, don't answer it. If there is a question but it is not for you to personally answer by name, don't answer it. If you have nothing important to add, don't answer it. Otherwise you'll end up in several email encounters that never die. ... If you send a note to your friend saying, "It sure is cold here!" you may not get a response. If you ask, "Is it cold there too?" you will get an answer. You are not allowed to say a month later that the other person owes you the next email because you told him it was cold in your area. That only works for real snail mailed letters delivered by a postal employee. With real mail, you play "tag," but not in email. Everything written above is from experience, things that people do all the time, things that newbies will do next week, things that shouldn't happen at all but are part of the natural learning process. Sending Group E-mail Messages Using Outlook Express 6 In Windows XP Home Edition Open Outlook Express. Click on the "Addresses" button on the Outlook Express toolbar or select "Address Book" from the Tools drop-down menu. The Address Book Window should appear listing your contacts in the right hand pane of the window. Click on the "New" button on the Address Book toolbar and select "New Group" from the drop-down menu. The new group's Properties form should appear. Type a name for your new group in the Group Name field. "Work," "Family," or "Friends" are good examples. Don't use a name like "Goofy People I Work With" because the name that you use for the group is the name that will show up in the "To" field of your message. Click your cursor arrow on the "Select Members" button on the right side of the window. A double paned Select Group Members window will appear. Highlight a name, multiple names, or all of the names from the listed contacts in the left hand frame and click the "Select" button at the top between the two panes. This will move the highlighted contact or contacts into the Members pane. Click "OK" when you've finished and click "OK" again to close the new group's Properties window. Click the red "X" to close the Address Book and use the new group name when you create your new e-mail message. Sending Group E-mail Messages Using Thunderbird 1.5 on Mac OS X or Windows XP Home Edition Open Thunderbird. Click on the "Address Book" button on the Thunderbird toolbar. The Address Book will open. Click on the "New List" button on the Address Book toolbar. A dialog box will drop down. Give the list a name in the "List Name" field. The other fields are optional. Don't fill in the big field that says "Type email addresses to add them to the mailing list:" unless the addresses you are adding are not in your current Address Book. Click "OK" to close the box. The new list that you just named should now appear as a separate folder in the left side of the Address Book pane under your Personal Address Book. If you don’t see it, you’ll need to expand your Personal Address Book file by clicking on the “+” sign next to it. Next, highlight a name, multiple names, or all of the names from the listed contacts and drag them onto the icon for your new list in the Address Books pane. Close your address book and create a new e-mail message. Click on the "Contacts" icon in your new message's toolbar. Select your "Personal Address Book" in the Address Book drop-down menu. Click on the name of the new list you created and click on the "Add To:" button. Compose and send your message. Sending Group E-mail Messages Using Mail.app 2, Address Book 4.0.4, and Mac OS X 10.4.9 To create a group of contacts, you will need to start by opening your Mac's built in Address Book application. Under the "File" menu, drop down to and select "New Group." A new group will appear in the list in the Group column. Type in a new group name. "Work," "Family," or "Friends" are good examples. Don't use a name like "Goofy People I Work With" because the name that you use for the group is the name that will show up in the "To" field of your message. Click on the "All" icon at the top of the Group column and a list of contacts will appear in the Name column. Highlight a name, multiple names, or all of the names from the listed contacts in the Name column and drag them onto the icon for the new group in the Group column. Close the address book and use the new group name when you create your new e-mail message. Write a perfect email Popular as it is, the web is not the most-used Internet application by transaction volume. Email is. It’s also the most misused. Since it’s such an important and often overlooked component of our online lives, I’m going to step away from preaching about the web for a moment and focus on simple steps to make your email discussions more effective. If you grew up like I did, you were taught how to write a letter. You learned how to write business and casual headings and salutations, state your purpose, make a request, set expectations for a response, and wrap it up with a Very Truly Yours. But an email is not a letter, and you’re not typing at a Selectric II typewriter. You may look at the days of formal graces in written communication with some sadness, but rest assured that they are as dead as Dillinger. If your purpose is to solicit information or action from another person via email, you must make that clear to them at the earliest possible point in the message. I get hundreds of emails a day, not counting spam. I know I’m not alone. Email overload is a problem, and it will probably only get worse. It’s tempting for geeks like me to propose some kind of microformat as a solution: begin subjects with these words, format the first line like that. But email is too widely distributed to corral into a any kind of structure now. All we can do is focus on quick, concise, effective communication. People differ in how they manage their inboxes, but attention to a few details can help make your messages more usable for everyone. These are the factors I’ve identified that will help you get a quick and valid response: Brevity It’s the soul of wit, you know. Short emails rule. When I get an email that’s several pages long, I have to make some decisions: do I have time to handle this now? Is it important enough to come back to? Can I pass it on to someone else? If I can’t say yes to any of these, I will probably never get back to it. You may have lots of information to share, but in email you are in a long list of others competing for your recipient’s attention. Keeping it brief is a sign of respect, and it’s less likely to cause added stress to your reader. Supporting material or other important info can be attached, but keep it separate from who you are, what your issue is, and what you want from me. If you’re passing a thread along, trim what isn’t needed. Why make the email look longer than it really is? Context If I don’t know you by name, tell me how you came to contact me. We talked about mixers at a podcasting meetup. You saw a panel I was on last year. You divorced me and married my best friend from high school. Something I would remember. I don’t need or want a resume, but I do need to know where you’re coming from. Getting a lot of responses asking, “What do you mean?” Context is your problem. When you’re asking a question, anticipate any missing details that could cause an extended back-and-forth. Each time someone sends you a reply, you’ve gone to the back of that person’s line. Do what you can to make your emails count the first time. And for god’s sake, have a subject line. One that makes sense. Some of the most important emails I’ve received didn’t have a subject, and they almost fell through as a result. Don’t waste that space with words like “Important” or “Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:”. If the topic changes, change the subject line to match it. Remember that on recipients’ screens, your subject competes with a large number of others for their attention. Something to act on Make your requests clear. You should set them apart from the rest of the message by paring them down to one sentence, with white space before and after. Make lists with dashes, asterisks, or bullets if you use HTML email. Closed-ended (yes or no, this or that) questions are preferred; open-ended questions can get long and involved, reducing their overall relevancy and the likelihood that you’ll get the response you desire. Don’t give people an excuse to misread you. If you’ve written a request at the end of a long paragraph, or been passive (“it’d be nice if somebody could…”), it’s likely to have been missed on the receiver’s end. If you sent an email, you have a point. Get to it. Some examples: Can I call you tomorrow morning at 10am PT? Here is my contact info for your address book. Would you send me any links you have where I can read more about x? Would you forward this to person y? I need your travel itinerary by end of day. Reasonable expectations Given that most of us have several current projects to keep up on, it’s not very likely that we’re be able to spend more than 10 minutes at a time helping someone who is emailing me out of the blue. My ability to draft my famous page-scrolling expositions of a given issue is limited. If I’ve already written something that covers it, I might just send you a link. Otherwise, if you can frame the question such that a lengthy answer isn’t required, you’re apt to get a quicker response. A deadline There comes a time when the response you seek is no longer useful. If you know when that is, tell your recipient. This can be a good way both to prompt a speedy turnaround, and to let people off the hook in the long term. When someone sees that, for example, you need a proposal in a timeframe they can’t make, they will probably bow out, rather than leaving you hanging. Everybody wins. Especially whoever it is you end up choosing in their place. You can’t win them all. If you need to send a single reminder, do so, but if that doesn’t do the trick, pick up a phone. If it’s not important enough to call the person directly, then let it go. Daily reminders suggest to recipients that they’re being bossed around, and that’s not the best way to manage people, and certainly no way to treat casual contacts. They may be too busy, or away from the computer, or actually working on your last request. If you’re forcing the issue, you don’t improve your chances of success with that person in the long term. September 5, 2007 Wired Read http://howto.wired.com/wiredhowtos/index.cgi?page_name=write_a_perfect_email;action=display;category=Work Create Custom Stationery Using Outlook Express Outlook Express includes built-in stationery templates that can be used for outgoing e-mail messages. This can be especially handy this time of the year when e-mailing your holiday greetings to friends and relatives. If none of the pre-installed stationery templates fit your needs, you can create your own stationery when using Outlook Express 6 in Windows XP Home Edition by following the steps below. With Outlook Express open, click on the small black arrow on the right side of the "Create Mail" button. Choose "Select Stationery" from the drop-down menu. At the bottom right of the "Select Stationery" window, click the "Create new" button to open the Stationery Setup Wizard. Click the "Next" button. To find a photo on your computer to use as a background, click on the "Browse" button under the "Picture" section. Navigate to the location where your photo is stored on your hard drive and then click on the photo to select it. Your background photo's name should now be shown in the "File name" box. Click the "Open" button. Select how you want your background photo to be displayed in your message by experimenting with the options under the "Position" section. (The "Preview" section to the right of the window will help you decide by allowing you to see a small representation of what your message will look like.) Choose how you want your photo to be tiled under the "Tile" section. For example, if you want to tile your photo over the entire message, select "Entire Page." If your photo doesn't cover the entire background and you want to choose a background color instead of white, check the "Color" box. Then select a color from the drop-down menu in the Color section. Click the "Next" button. Choose the font, font size, and font color that you want your messages to be when using the stationery that you are creating. Then click the "Next" button. Choose the size of your left and top margins. Then click the "Next" button. Name your stationery by typing a title into the "Name" field. Click the "Finish" button to create your new stationery. You will be taken back to the "Select Stationery" window. Select your new stationery from the list and click "OK." Back to Class Help Thank you for joining The Smoker's Club! Your being a member allows us to know how many people we are representing, so please ask your friends to join as well!