E-mail Etiquette.

This page was written to tackle a couple of e-mail issues.

Forwarding e-mail to more than one person and e-mailing to one or more poeple.

Forwarding netiquette and e-mailing more than one person in an e-mail especially large groups or people.

Do you get e-mail from people you don't know?

Do you get lots of forwarded e-mail from others?

Here is the best way to forward e-mail to others if and when you do.

Feel free to send this to those who forward e-mail to you.

This also applies to direct e-mails you send to anyone.

The From: line will be the e-mail address you are mailing from in the mailer program.

To:

In this line, if you are mailing to a group of people, especially a group of people unrelated to each other or a list of people you regularly e-mail too, you should put your own e-mail address as the one to be forwarded to. This helps people respond back to you and also helps in preventing them from responding back to the entire list. You will also get a copy back of what you sent and be able to see what the others actually received.

CC: Carbon Copy

Put those who you are not directly mailing for a response here as an FYI. If it is many addresses, you should put those in a BCC: as explained below.

BCC: Blind Carbon Copy

 

This is the reason I typed all of this page. Put all of those who you wish to forward to, in a Blind Carbon Copy or a BCC: This hides the e-mail addresses of those who you have forwarded to others. If you don't have Outlook or Outlook Express please find out how to do this. on AOL it is a double parenthesis followed by a comma when there are more than one. ((johndoe@aol.com)) In Outlook or Outlook Express click on the Address Book icon next to the To: line. select who you want to send to and click the bcc: to put them in the BCC field instead of the To: field. This provides a feeling of security to those you are forwarding to. I see so many forwarded e-mail with lines and lines of peoples e-mail addresses in the forwarded text. Many times I don't know most of the people in that list. If I were one who wanted to send junk mail this would be a wonderful source of valid e-mail addresses. I personally do not like my e-mail address forwarded in this manner. I would be a little angry if I were one of those people in that list.

Subject:

I suggest not simply forwarding things as that raises a person's suspicions as to whether it is junk mail or even a virus. When it says FWD in the Subject line that means it was simply forwarded and maybe even not read or looked at before sending. This is often how viruses are sent. When I see an e-mail that says FWD FWD I just delete it without even reading it.

Text:

This is where it gets tricky.

First of all there are still people out there with juno and some other e-mail programs that cannot receive html enriched text so it is best to set Reply to messages using the format in which they were sent under the tools, options, Send tab. Try to make sure not to forward as html enriched text unless you are sure they all have that ability.

I(the author) hate those little >>>> lines in e-mail forwarding. These lines are intended for sending comments with something someone has forwarded. It does serve a purpose in that sense to distinguish what was forwarded from the editorial of the person forwarding the message. If you do a lot of forwarding without any editorial then I suggest turning that function off in your e-mail program. For Outlook and Outlook Express click on Tools, then Options, then Send, then Plain text settings. Uncheck the Indent the original text with > when replying or forwarding.

The best way to forward something is to actually cut and paste it into a new message. I realize this takes more time and is a little more complicated but it looks much nicer and more professional once it is done. To cut and past the text, in the message that you want to forward, click on Edit then select all or put the cursor where you wish to start copying in the message and drag with the left mouse button to the end of the text you wish to forward. If you do this regularly with all your forwarded e-mail it will become second nature and not difficult at all.

You are visitor #since 22 July 2003