In a conversation, there is some minimum of shared context. You might be in the same physical location, and even on the phone you have, at minimum, commonality of time. When you generate a document for paper, usually there is some context embedded in the medium: the text is in the proceedings of a conference, written on a birthday card, handed to your professor with a batch of Econ 101 term papers, or something similar.
With email, you can't assume anything about a sender's location, time, frame of mind, profession, interests, or future value to you. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your receivers some context. This section will give specific strategies for doing so.
Subject: need 3 thrombos by Tues Chris - I need three thromblemeisters for Thursday's demo in Boston. They need to be left-handed, and they need to be packed for shipping by Tuesday night.Here the subject line summarizes nicely the most important details of the message.
If your message is in response to another piece of email, your email software will probably preface the subject line with Re: or RE: (for REgarding). If your email composition software doesn't do this, it would be polite to put in RE: by hand.
Subject: Re: need 3 thrombos by Tues Pat - I've got two thromblemeisters already packed from last week's demo, but I don't have another functional left-handed one right now. Can you cope with two lefties and one rightie?
For time-critical messages, starting with URGENT: is a good idea (especially if you know the person gets a lot of email):
Subject: URGENT: need left-handed thrombo I've *got* to have another left-handed thromblemeister for the Boston demo, and I need it by tomorrow afternoon. Chris only has two, and I've got to have three. Chris *does* have a broken leftie, so if anyone could fix that one, or if they have one in their desk somewhere, I'd really appreciate it!
For requests, starting with REQ: can signal that action is needed:
Subject: REQ: turn in thrombos Pat's call for a left-handed thromblemeister turned up 12 functional lefties that were lying around people's offices unused. Please take a moment to look around your area for thromblemeisters (rightie *or* leftie) that you are no longer using, and get them back to Chris.
If you are offering non-urgent information that requires no response from the other person, prefacing the subject line with FYI: (For Your Information) is not a bad idea, as in
Subject: FYI: donuts in break room The donut fairy left a dozen doughnuts in the downstairs break room. First come, first served!
Subject: information Please send me information about UIUC.This gave me very little clue as to what the person wanted to know about: admission application deadlines? The number of students? The acreage? The number of buildings? Was I supposed to send paper documents or give URLs? The only thing I could do with email like this was ask for further context. Mail like this would have been much better as
Subject: UIUC history Are there any Web pages about the history of the U of I?
Instead of sending email that says:
yesSay:
> Did you get all of the left-handed thromblemeisters > that you needed? yesThe greater-than sign (>) is the most conventional way to quote someone else's email words, but your email software may use a different convention.
Even if there are a fair number of words in your response, you still might need to quote the previous message. Imagine getting a response on Monday to some email that you can't quite remember sending on Friday.
I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see the other one before they make up their minds.Your response would probably be the highly articulate, "Huh???" It would be much easier for you to understand email that said:
> I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassembly
> ready; as soon as I get a decision on the
> thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go.
> Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether
> they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or
> do they want to wait and check out the right-handed
> one first?
I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
the other one before they make up their minds.
This is substantially better, but now errs on the side of too much context.
The first three lines have nothing to do with the question being answered. You
should only include enough to provide a context for the message and no more. (Peter
Kimble, my high school computer science teacher, now gives his students the heuristic
that at least half of the lines in an email message should be their own.)
You need only enough context to frame the question being answered:
> Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether
> they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or
> do they want to wait and check out the right-handed
> one first?
I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
the other one before they make up their minds.
> Have you talked to the thermo guys [about which handedness they want]? I talked to the thermo group on Wednesday, and they think the left-handed thromblemeister will probably work, but they want to evaluate the right-handed unit before they make up their minds.Now the answer is very clear and specific. And, since the response contains implicit yet clear references to the original message, less explicitly quoted material is needed. Responses like this, with the context mostly in the body of the message, are the easiest to understand. Unfortunately, they take the longest to compose.
If you want to quote a sentence that is in the middle of a paragraph, or wraps around lines, go ahead and remove everything but the part that you were really interested in, inserting "[...]" if you have to take something out in the middle. You can also paraphrase by using square brackets, as above.
If the message isn't important enough to you to warrant the time to pare the original message down, include the whole thing after your response, not before. If you put the original message at the end, your readers don't have to look at it unless they don't understand the context of your response.
Hiya! Hey, I loved the presentation you gave to Jack this morning. Great Job!but if your correspondent's software can't handle formatting, the message could show up as:
Hiya! Hey, I <I>loved<I> the presentation you gave to Jack this morning. <B>Great Job!<B>
Web documents are particularly difficult to read with older email programs. You may have a choice of sending the web page as text or as HTML; keep your correspondent's capabilities in mind when you make that choice.
However, the net is a different place now. Characters like ä, ç, and Ø are now important for large numbers of email users. So now there is a way of encoding data so that 256 different characters can be represented, called "quoted-printable".
Unfortunately, the underlying transport is still limited to 128 different characters, so the email gets converted to the more limited set, transmitted, then (hopefully) converted back on the other end. If the receiving software doesn't know how to do quoted-printable (or if something gets munged somewhere), the extended characters will show up as an equals-sign and two letter/digit code:
La premi=E8re journe=E9 de nos deux voyageurs fut assez agr=E9able. Ils =E9= taient encourag=E9s par l'id=E9e de se voir possesseurs de plus de tr=E9sors que l'Asie, l'Europe, et l'Afrique n'en pouvaient rassembler. Candide, transport=E9, =E9crivit le nom de Cun=E9gonde sur les arbres.
So why do you care? After all, you might not ever use umlauts. You care because there are "special" characters that you probably will encounter, that are NOT part of the standard extended character set, but which some software will allow you to insert. Even if your correspondent's software knows how to convert codes back to extended characters, different computers have different symbols for the same codes. For example, the trademark symbol, bullet, and "curly" quotation marks are all legal characters in both Windows95 and MacOS, but are in different places in the character set. For example, Windows thinks that character number 241 is a ñ, while the Mac thinks that character number 241 is a Ò. Thus you have yet another reason to worry about what your correspondent's email software is capable of.
You should also be careful about punctuation - especially periods - right after a URL. For example, take the message
Hi - The URL is http://www.webfoot.com/writings.html. See if you like it!The software on the receiving end may think that that last period after the URL is part of the URL. Or, if the software doesn't recognize links, the reader may cut-and-paste too much. Either has the potential to lead to an ugly email exchange, with your correspondent insisting that the page doesn't exist and you insisting that it does. I will admit that it looks ugly, but it causes less confusion if there is at least a space after the URL:
Hi - The URL is http://www.webfoot.com/writings.html . See if you like it!People who are cutting and pasting might also select too little. Since HTML files can have either the extension .html or .htm, this can also be a difficult mistake for your reader to catch. To make cut-and-paste mindlessly easy for people, I try to always put URLs on a separate line:
Hi - The URL is http://www.webfoot.com/writings.html See if you like it!Yes, the period after the URL is now missing. Yes, this is ungrammatical, but I sure don't want to put it on the next line! I have found it worthwhile to trade grammatical perfection for easier cut-and-paste.
Some URLs are so long that they will get split into two lines:
Hi - The URL is http://www.webfoot.com/advice/translations/indonesian/email. formality.html See if you like it!If your correspondent's email software makes links live, it is probably not capable of realizing that formality.html belongs with the rest of the URL.
Hi - The URL is http://www.webfoot.com/advice/translations/indonesian/email. formality.html See if you like it!If your correspondent is cutting and pasting, he or she may not see the last bit. What you can do is put angle brackets around the URL. Some (but not all) email software will recognize that stuff inside angle brackets should be kept together:
Hi - The URL is <http://www.webfoot.com/advice/translations/indonesian/email. formality.html> See if you like it!
Bob said, "I love you madly."That's fine when the stuff in quotes is normal speech, but can cause problems when discussing computer input. Consider:
When you get to the password box, type "smiley."Is the period something that goes in the password box or not? I prefer to use British grammar rules and say
When you get to the password box, type "smiley".This makes it clear that the period does not go in the password box.
I could switch back and forth between the two styles, depending on whether the thing in quotes was to be typed or not, but I would rather be consistent so that if the period is supposed to be in the password box, that will be clear.
If you can't bear to do such gyrations, modify the sentence so that there isn't punctuation there:
When you get to the password box, type "smiley" and hit return.or if you want to make it absolutely clear:
When you get to the password box, type smiley and hit return.
If your correspondent has a mail reader that can handle attachments, this can work very well: a long attachment can be looked at later. However, if your correspondent's email software doesn't understand attachments and you send a non-text file (like a Word document, a binary, a picture, or even compressed text), be advised that it will appear as lots of garbage. Pages and pages of garbage, usually.
Even if your correspondent has email software that understands what attachments are, they still have to have software to read the document. Think of it this way: somebody can use the Post Office to send you any kind of document. But if you send someone microfilm, they probably won't be able to read it. Even executable programs can't always be useful to your correspondent. Macintosh programs won't run on Microsoft Windows machines; Windows95 programs will not run on DOS machines.
Furthermore, even if your correspondents can receive and view the attachment you send them, if they are low on disk space or dial in from home to get their email, they will not be happy to receive a 200MB video, no matter how funny it is.
It almost always better to post large documents on the Web and email the URL instead of the file. If you don't have that option, please email your correspondents first and ask them if they can handle a large attachment of that format.
Created 30 Oct 1998
Tweaked 7 Dec 1998
Added angle brackets to URLs (to help the client make URLs hot) 9 Nov 1999
I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassembly
ready; as soon as I get a decision on the thromblemeister
selection, I'll be ready to go.
Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether they are ready to go with the
left-handed thrombo or do they want to wait and check out the right-handed one first?
Furthermore, the "quoted-printable" encoding also contributes to the line-length problems. If a line is longer than 76 characters, it is split after the 75th character and the line ends with an equals sign. People whose email reading software can understand quoted-printable encoding will probably have the lines automatically reconstructed, but others will see ugly messages, like the following:
I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassemby ready; as soon as I get a= decision on the thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go. Have you= talked to the thermo guys about whether they are ready to go with the= left-handed thrombo or do they want to wait and check out the right-handed= one first?
There are even a few email readers that truncate everything past the eightieth character. This is not the way to win friends and influence people.
You should try to keep your lines under seventy characters long. Why seventy and not, say, seventy-six? Because you should leave a little room for the indentation or quote marks your correspondents may want if they need to quote pieces of your message in their replies.
If you are sending a report to many people, then you may need to put more detail into the email so that you aren't flooded with questions from everyone on the recipient list. (You should also ask yourself carefully if all the people really need to be on the list.)
The fewer the people there are on the recipient list, the shorter the message should be. Books to thousands of people are tens of thousands of words long. Speeches in front of large groups are thousands of words long. But you'd tune out someone at a party who said more than a hundred words at a time.
I try to keep everything on one "page". In most cases, this means twenty-five lines of text. (And yes, that means that this document is way, WAY too long for email!)
While you cannot make your voice higher or lower, louder or softer to denote emphasis, there are games you can play with text to convey vocal inflection and emotion.
Instead of:
I said that I was going to go last Thursday.Say:
I *said* that I was going to go last Thursday.Or:
I said that I was going to to go last *Thursday*.Which of the above two you choose depends upon whether you are adamant about the commitment you made or adamant that you didn't mean Wednesday. (Restructuring the sentence to remove the ambiguity would be an even better idea.)
You can also capitalize the first letter only of words to give light emphasis:
While Bob may say that you should never turn it past nine, this is not Cast In Stone. It will explode if you turn it up to eleven, but anything under ten should work just fine.I tend to use first-capitals to refer to things that are somehow dogmatic or reverential. This is probably a cultural holdover from all the capital letters that are used in the English Bible. It might not translate to other languages or cultures.
> Should I just boost the power on the thrombo? No, if you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat the motors and it might explode.Say:
> Should I just boost the power on the thrombo? NO!!!! If you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat the motors and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!Note that you should use capital letters sparingly. Just as loss of sight can lead to improved hearing, the relative lack of cues to emotion in email makes people hyper-sensitive to any cues that might be there. Thus, capital letters will convey the message that you are shouting.
It is totally inappropriate to use all capital letters in a situation where you are calm. Don't do this:
HEY, I JUST WANTED TO SEE IF YOU HAD MADE ANY PROGRESS ON THE PHROCKMEIJER ACCOUNT. STOP BY AND SEE ME SOMETIME.People will wince when they read that email.
If you are late this time, I swear upon my mother's grave that I will never, *never*, *NEVER*, >>!!**NEVER**!!<< talk to you again.Use this sparingly.
I sometimes write what I really think and then write down the sanitized version:
My boss got fired I mean resigned today, which *totally* sucks err.. will lead to enhanced relations between Engineering and Test.A friend of mine uses double parentheses to denote "inner voice", what in the theatre world is called an "aside":
My boss resigned ((got fired)) today which is going to lead to enhanced relations between Engineering and Test ((in their dreams))Something else that I will do sometimes to denote the "lowering of voice" is to type without any capital letters:
psssst! hey wendy! guess what? I GOT THE JOB!!!! :-D :-D !!
I should warn you that there is a minority that doesn't like the shortcuts I showed you. They argue that if Mark Twain could convey emotion without resorting to such artifice, then we should too. Well, I'm not as skilled a writer as Mark Twain, and usually don't have as many words to make my tone clear as he did. I believe that there is a greater danger of angering or offending someone by not using these shortcuts than there is of annoying someone by using them.
While you are unable to accompany your words with hand or facial gestures, there are several textual stand-ins for gestures.
:-) ;-)and
:-((To understand these symbols, turn your head counter-clockwise and look at them sideways. You should see little faces.)
While people will have slightly different interpretations of the exact difference between the upper two, my personal opinion is that the upper one means more "I'm happy" and the lower one means more "I think I'm being funny". The last one is pretty universally understood as "I'm sad".
Typical examples:
Hey, guess what - I got the left-handed thromblemeister spec done ahead of time! :-) I'm on my way to fame and fortune now! ;-)The second smiley, the ;-), indicates that you don't really believe that your boss will give you that big raise. It is similar to but not as fierce or trendy a rebuttal as a "NOT!" appended to the end of a sentence:
Hey, guess what - I got the left-handed thromblemeister spec done ahead of time! :-) I'm on my way to fame and fortune now - NOT!There are a wide range of ASCII gestures available to you, from ill (%^P) to angry (>:-<) to astonished (:-o), limited only by your imagination. There is a whole Smiley FAQ out there if you are feeling uncreative. (Note: I think that some of the Smiley Dictionary definitions of the basic smileys aren't a totally accurate reflection of the way I see smileys used, but your mileage may vary.)
Well, it might not explode.gives less information. I like to use lots of whitespace and typed-out vocalizations of "I'm thinking" sounds, as follows:
Weeeellllll.... errr hem. Wellll, it *might* not explode.You can also use whitespace to make it more clear which words belong to which clause. For example, the following is very difficult to parse
Did you want to use a left-handed thromblemeister or a right-handed one with a half-twist or a Jackadoody brocket?You could instead haul out your high school notes on outlines:
Did you want to use 1. a left-handed thromblemeister or 2. a right-handed one with a a. half-twist b. Jackadoody brocketThe only problem with using an outline like this is it invites people to send back messages that have nothing in them but the code for the answer they want, such as
2b.To avoid that, you can use a structure like:
Did you want to use a left-handed thromblemeister or right-handed one with a half-twist or right-handed one with a Jackadoody brocket?This invites people to cut-and-paste the exact, full thing they want:
> a right-handed one with a Jackadoody brocket?
I am very confused and a little upset. Why did you give my report to Jack instead of Jill?I would probably say:
?!?! Why did you give my report to Jack instead of Jill?!?The question mark is kind of shorthand for a furrowed brow or a "huh?". The exclamation mark is shorthand for amazement and possibly a scowl. The two together seem to mean astonishment.
There is a long and proud tradition of using punctuation as a place holder for swearing, e.g. That #%&#$(*! You will also sometimes see an asterisk in place of important letters, usually the vowel, e.g. That son of a b*tch! or That son of a b****! or very rarely That s*n of a b*tch!. (In actual practice, this form of self-censorship is rare; it is more common for people to either use the whole word or omit it completely.)
Just as you have no guarantees about your correspondents' context, you can't determine much about their status. You can't look at their clothes, note their dialect and rate of speech, listen the timbre of their voice, or count the wrinkles around their eyes. Your guesses about your correspondent's age, race, gender, marital status, affluence, intelligence, and education will be much less accurate than they usually would be in a face-to-face or even telephone conversation.
Your correspondents can't tell much about you either. They will probably do the same thing you will probably catch yourself doing - make assumptions on the flimsiest of pretexts.
I am emphatically not saying that it is good for people to make assumptions. But because there are so few status cues to draw upon, they will. You need to be aware of that, so that you can work on guiding their assumptions if you need to.
Furthermore, some people are literally insulted by getting email with errors, especially typographical errors. They feel that it is disrespectful to send email with blatant errors. (Note that you can use this to your advantage. If you want to flaunt your superior status, you can insert some typos deliberately.)
I realize that in a perfect world, we would all have the luxury of faultless writing. However, we do not live in a perfect world. Good grammar is very hard for some people, just as painting portraits, solving partial differential equations, shoeing horses, and sinking putts can be very hard for others. This has always been true, but before the advent of electronic technology, people who were not very skilled at writing could do most of their communication verbally. This coping strategy is less possible now.
Spending more time crafting prose can improve the quality of the writing, but it is not possible to spend an hour on each email message if you need to send ten of them per day. Fortunately, grammar- and spell-checkers can help enormously. If high status is important to your message, you should definitely use them. However, there are certain classes of errors that grammar- and spell-checkers will not find. If you really want to boost your language-related status, you may have to commit yourself to some significant studying.
Personally, I would like my correspondents to spend their time on providing appropriate context instead of on perfecting their grammar. I would much rather get email that says:
There is 50 people with machien guns on Main Street abt 1 mi aways wallking north and they not friendly so getcher butts outta here protno!!!!!than one about the same situation that says:
You would be advised to leave the building promptly.I can guess at proper grammar; I can't guess at proper context.
Any stereotype that is held about the organization that gives you your email connection will rub off on you. For example, if your email comes from:
Your correspondents will also look at your real name (if visible) and log-in ID. Unless your name has cues to the contrary, most people will assume that you match the dominant species of your organization and/or country. People will frequently assume that bpj@thromble.com is male but that barbara@thromble.com will be female - even though barbara could easily be a man named Peter Barbara. Unless the name is something like Smith, people are likely to assume that the author of any email coming from Taiwan is Asian. Unless the screen name is something like Jamaal, people will usually assume that authors of email coming from the U.S. are of European descent.
Your log-in ID gives even more subtle cues. Having a desirable email name - short and without numbers - can indicate that you were one of the first in your domain to get an email account. Thus, steve@thromble.com has probably been using computers longer than steve9672@thromble.com.
People may also make assumptions about your maturity and formality level. Your correspondent will probably take Barbara.J.Periwinkle@thromble.com more seriously than barbiedoll@thromble.com.
You can steer people's impressions very easily just by telling them who you are. You can do this by adding a signature with status cues:
Barbara J. Periwinkle Vice-President of Legal Affairs Itty Bitty Machines, Inc.Or:
Peter Periwinkle Kennedy Middle School (Age 14) Check out the Latvian Homepage at http://www.latvia.org!Here, young Mr. Periwinkle gives the cue that he might be of Latvian origin.
It can also be effective to lead off a message with status information:
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a student at Kennedy Middle School in White Plains. I'm doing a project at school on imaginary industrial equipment. Could you please send me the latest thromblemeister catalog?Or:
Hi - I'm the Vice-President of Legal Affairs with Itty Bitty Machines. Could you please send me the latest thromblemeister catalog? I'm considering purchasing stock in your company.Note that here the author not only gives a title and professional affiliation, but also shows off language facility by using big words: "considering purchasing" instead of "thinking of buying". Overuse of big words can sound pretentious, but in short messages can enhance status. Be careful, though, that you use the words properly, and that they aren't so obscure that your correspondent can't understand them.
In addition to the composition of the email message, people will look at how appropriate the message was. Was it sent to the right person? Was it a reasonable question?
Conversations involving people with exaggerated status differences and those to audiences that are unborn, dead, and/or large tend to use very formal language.
Conversely, intimate discussions use very informal language. If you used the same language with your spouse that you used with the Queen, your spouse would probably wonder what he or she did to make you angry!
Thus you can control to some extent how many responses you get to your email messages by how formal your language is. Because email is so easy to respond to, people naturally tend to use very informal prose.
The informal tone encourages your correspondents to respond. This can be a very good thing if you want feedback. However, if your email address is in a very public place, you may well find yourself getting far more email than you are interested in.
So be cautious about the tone of your messages. If want people to respond, be chatty and informal. But if you want to discourage people from sending you email, you should write much more formally.
Many people do not give either a salutation or a signature. After all, while a letter can get separated from its envelope easily, it is difficult to separate an email message's body from its addressing information. The email message itself says who it is to and from.
However, that information might not be adequate for your needs. It might be difficult to find with some email reading software. It might be unclear or ambiguous. It might be inadequate for telling the receivers just why they are getting that message. Or, it might not convey the proper formality or status cues for your purposes.
I will give you my thoughts on openers and closers, but you need to think carefully about what you are trying to convey both explicitly and implicitly. You also need to take the culture and customs of all parties into consideration.
In the United States, it is an bad idea to use "Sir" or "Mr." unless you are absolutely certain that your correspondent is male. Similarly, it is probably safer to use "Ms." instead of "Miss" or "Mrs." unless you know the preference of the woman in question.
In the United States, using someone's first name is usually ok. Thus, you can usually get away with a "Dear" and the first name.
Dear Chris:Here you are covered regardless of whether Chris is male or female. (Beware of using a diminutive if you aren't certain your correspondent uses it. It might rankle Judith to be called Judy; Robert might hate being called Bob.)
If you are addressing a group of people, you can say "Dear" plus the unifying attribute. For example:
Dear Project Managers:Or:
Dear San Jose Lasers Fans:
Hello - I saw your web site and wanted to mention that I invented the thromblemeister on Feb 29, 2403, *not* on Feb 28, 2402.I usually use a simple "Hi" for people that I already know:
Hi - Are you interested in getting together for sushi next week? I can bring all my wedding pictures and bore you to death. ;-)"Good Morning" and "Good Afternoon" don't make a lot of sense with email, as the sun may have moved significantly by the time your correspondent gets around to it. "Good Day" sounds stilted to American ears (although it is common in other parts of the former British Empire). You may want to avoid "Greetings" in the United States: it reminds many people of the draft notices young men got during the Vietnam War.
Again, you must be careful about cultural differences. The East Coast of the United States is more formal than the West Coast (where I live). Germans are even more formal; they can work side-by-side for years and never get around to a first-name basis. Starting a message to Germany with Dear Hans might be a bad idea.
Good answers to the questions can take several forms:
Dear Ms. Sherwood: I am an editor at Very Large Publishing Company, Inc. I sat next to your husband on United last week, and he mentioned that you are interested in publishing a book based on your email guide. I have read your guide, and would be very interested in receiving a proposal from you.Or:
My name is Dave Wilcox and I'm the legal counsel for Thromblemeisters Direct, Inc. We are deeply disturbed at the aspersions you cast upon us and on thromblemeisters in your email guide. Therefore, we order you to immediately cease and desist using any reference to thromblemeisters in your email guide. If you do not, we will be forced to file suit against you or your descendants if and when we and/or thromblemeisters come into existence.Or even:
Hi - I am a novice email user and just read your email guide. I don't know if you are the right person to ask or not, but do you know what the French word for "Mister" is? If you can tell me the answer, I'll send you a funny postcard.
Some good friends of mine recently got email from my cousin for the first time. Unfortunately, not all of the email made it through. The message they got said only:
Dear Rich and Chris: I met you at Jim and Ducky's wedding.But, because he identified where he knew Rich and Chris from immediately, it was enough information that they knew he was someone to pay attention to. They replied to him and communication is now going smoothly between them.
Hi - when did you want to go to lunch? Rebecca P. Snodwhistle Thromblemeisters Direct, Inc. 666 Beast Street Styx, HI 77340 +1 (959) 123-4567 voice +1 (959) 123-4568 FAX snodwhistle@throbledirect.com W becca@thromboqueen.net (personal)Such an extensive amount of signature information in contrast to such a short question looks silly to me. I think much of the above signature is extraneous. If they got the email from you, they can reply by email, so don't need your FAX number or street address. (If they have to send a FAX or package, they can ask for addressing information.) They already have one email address in the message you sent, and don't need your other email address.
The name is perfectly reasonable to include, especially if
If the message is business related, including the company name is a reasonable thing to do - even if the message is going to someone else in the same company.
One thing that is missing from Rebecca P. Snodwhistle's signature, above, that I would like to see is her job title. Is she the vice-president of sales or the shipping clerk? That may have more of an influence on the correspondent than anything else.
So I would rewrite the above signature to be:
Rebecca P. Snodwhistle Chief Executive Officer, Thromblemeisters Direct, Inc. +1 (959) 123-4567 voiceThat signature is still overkill for arranging lunch, but it isn't always convenient to switch between having your signature included or not.
Some people put things purely for entertainment in their signature: artwork, philosophical sayings, jokes, and/or quotations in their signature. This can be ok, but don't overdo it. A good heuristic is to keep your signature at or under five lines long.
After setting up signature that is included automatically, it is easy to forget about it. (After all, your email software might not show it to you, or it might be so routine that you never look at it again.) So whenever a piece of contact information changes, make sure to revisit your signature to make sure that it is still up-to-date. And, if you have an entertainment piece in your signature, change it every once in a while. It wasn't as funny the fiftieth time your coworker saw it as it was the first time.
One final note on signatures: they are a good way to let your correspondent know that all of the message got transmitted properly. There is no body language to signal that you are "done talking" and, unfortunately, email transmissions sometimes get interrupted.
----------------------------------------------------------------- Rebecca P. Snodwhistle | CEO, Thromblemeisters Direct, Inc. +1 (959) 123-4567 voice | +1 (959) 123-4567 fax -----------------------------------------------------------------These are very pretty to sighted people, but imagine what it would be like for people who are so visually challenged that they have their computer read their email to them: "hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen..."
Greetings are difficult to do well, especially if you are crossing cultures and/or languages. In the United States, you can be pretty informal, but even in the U.S., you need to be careful that you aren't either making assumptions or using sensitive words.
A number of new users have asked me to include a jargon/acronym page for email. Contrary to how you might feel, there is not a conspiracy out there to try to exclude you. Every group that spends any time together develops its own shorthand notation; it is not surprising that people forced to use the unnatural action of typing would be inclined towards acronyms. Some of these come from Usenet newsgroups, some of the more "gestural" ones come from Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Obviously it would be nice of seasoned users to not pepper novices with an enormous amount of jargon, but on the Internet, nobody knows you are a newcomer.
Here are some of the most common acronyms and expressions:
Jargon that is sometimes used:
A term that I would love to see popularized is "NRN", for "No Response Needed". Sometimes, without body language, it isn't clear when an email-based conversation should be ended.
To unravel jargon and technical Internet terms, see also the fine Internet Literacy Consultants' Glossary of Internet Terms. There is also a Dictionary of Computer Acronyms and Jargon. A simpler list is at Harry Yeatts' acronyms page.
If I wave my hands and simplify just a little bit, the left-most word is the name of the actual computer that handles the mail. Small organizations might only have one computer that does everything; larger organizations might have multiple computers. For example, Ames Research Center email addresses currently all go through mail.arc.nasa.gov.
If you get email from someone, and there is no at sign (@), then that probably means they have the exact same domain as you. For example, if pat@bogusname.com sends email to chris@bogusname.com, Chris might see only pat in the return address field.
If there seems to be something missing from the domain name, then your correspondent may share some domain information. For example, if pat@uno.bogusname.com sends email to chris@dos.bogusname.com, Chris might see only pat@uno in the return address field.
| TLD | Meaning | Examples |
| .com | Commercial business, a company | ibm.com, att.com, ford.com |
| .net | Network provider, Internet Service Provider | webtv.net |
| .gov | U.S. governmental agency | whitehouse.gov, nasa.gov |
| .edu | U.S. educational institution | uiuc.edu, stanford.edu |
| .org | Non-profit institution | redcross.org, sfopera.org |
| .mil | U.S. military | army.mil |
| .int | International | itu.int |
The three-letter top-level domains (except for int) were once exclusively U.S. domains. They are still heavily U.S.-centric.
| TLD | Country | Examples |
| us | United States | city.palo-alto.ca.us, washington.k12.ia.us |
| uk | United Kingdom | cam.ac.uk, tvr.co.uk |
| my | Malaysia | parlimen.gov.my, jaring.my |
| de | Germany (Deutschland) | sgi.de |
| jp | Japan | www.hitachi.co.jp, www.nihon-u.ac.jp |
| to | Tonga | netsurf.to |
| tv | Tuvalu | internet.tv |
Commercial entities frequently have co in the next-to-last word in their domain. For example, Hitachi Japan is at hitachi.co.jp.
United States two-letter domains usually have the two-letter state or territory abbreviation right before the .us. For example, the city of Palo Alto in California has the domain city.palo-alto.ca.us. (Remember that the scope increases as you go left to right: palo-alto.us.ca would be in Canada if it existed!) U.S. State and territory codes can be found at http://www.usps.gov/cpim/ftp/pubs/201html/addrpack.htm#abbr .
Children's schools in the United States frequently have the word k12 in them. (This is short for "Kindergarten through 12th grade", the U.S. terms for schools for students nominally ages 5-18.) Community colleges frequently have cc as the next-to-last word in the domain.
Universities in Europe frequently have the word "uni" in their domains somewhere, short for "university".
Canada also sometimes uses province codes; those can be found at http://www.cdnnet.ca/info/application-form.
The UK also uses
France uses
There are a bunch of subdomains that have been defined in the us domain, including:
Basically, money. The countries of Tuvalu and Tonga have raised badly-needed cash by selling the rights to their extensions to outside parties, who then sell them to other bidders. (They think that the English word "to" and the common abbreviation "TV" for "television" are worth something as extensions.) And since .com is what people try first when looking for a company, many entities chose to use that instead of something in their country's two-letter top-level domain.
There are also some classes of organization that don't fit any of the domains particularly well. Individuals who want to put up a web page are not companies, nor non-profits, nor military. For-profit arts organizations don't fit comfortably in either .com or .org.
Take all domain names with a grain of salt. There are no penalties for taking a name in the "wrong" domain, so when people think it will get them some advantage, it happens.
If you have any questions about email, be sure to check out our Newbie forums, the best place to discuss and become better aclimated with anything newbie or technology related!