EMail Etiquette Essay Research Paper EMail Etiquette (стр. 2 из 2)

Make a comment about grammar or punctuation. Nobody wants to feel like they are exchanging e-mail with their eighth-grade English teacher.

Send a mass-mailing advertisement. This is numero uno on the don’ts list and will generate more flames than the devil himself.

Think about the amount of junk mail you receive everyday by snail mail. Even though you don’t want it, you find you must look through all of it because somewhere in that stack of unwanted advertisements and wasted paper could be your monthly water bill. The same principle applies to the e-mail. Would you want to search through a mailbox full of advertisements simply to find that all-important message from your boss?

Request computer help without providing system-specific information. For example, if I submitted an e-mail that stated “I’ve got this problem with Word…”. Well is that MS Word for DOS, MS Word for Windows, MS Word for Macs? What version? Version 2.0? Version 6.0?

Remember, the world (and its users) is made up of every kind of computer imaginable, from IBM PC’s to Macs to UNIX workstations to the one your neighbor assembled in his garage.

The correct method would be to list all the system specifics first, then describe the problem or question. For example, if I were seeking answers to questions about Microsquish Word for my computer at home, I would list Gizmo Model SR-32 (Microchannel Clone, 486-66Mhz, 16MB RAM, 400MB SCSI hard disk), MS DOS 6.22, MS Windows 3.11, MS Word 6.0a and then state the problem in detail.

Send a e-mail asking for the meaning of BTW or

. If you’ve not already found these in this document, keep reading. E-mail users use lots of abbreviations (not everyone can type 200 words a minute) and other funny characters. These are two of the more common examples — “BTW” is the equivalent of “by the way” and is a happy face or smile (turn your head to the left).

Better Than Snail Mail

You would think that since e-mail is electronic and electronic information is suppose to move at the speed of light, your e-mail message would arrive seconds after you send it. If you’re sending e-mail to the person in the office next to yours it might happen that way. In most cases, however, the message will probably take anywhere from a couple of minutes (majority of the time) to a couple of days (in which case there is usually a problem).

Think of it this way. Sending e-mail locally is as easy as delivering it by hand. Following that premise, if you had to hand deliver mail to some one clear across the country, doesn’t that take a little more effort?

The reason it takes longer is that in the transmission of a message from point A to point B, the message may pass across one, two, or up to who-knows-how-many different types of mail systems before it reaches its destination. Remember my earlier statement? All computers (and e-mail systems) are not the same.

No matter how far away you are sending your e-mail message I’ll guarantee that it will beat snail mail. On top of that you save the cost of a stamp.

A Blessing And A Curse

E-mail is a conversation that does not require an immediate response (like a telephone). If someone calls you on the telephone, you pick it up (unless you have an answering machine, voice mail or you are just plain rude) and the conversation begins. This is an interactive conversation.

With e-mail you send a message and then wait for a response. The response may come in five minutes or the response may come in five days. Either way it’s not an interactive conversation.

If a hundred people send you e-mail in one day, so what? You didn’t have to talk with all one hundred. Just think of all the hellos, good-byes and other unnecessary chit-chat you avoided. With e-mail you only deal with their messages (which usually omit hellos, good-byes and such) and you deal with them on your own time. That’s the blessing.

Now for the curse.

Too many users assume that the minute someone receives an e-mail it, the person will read it. Bad assumption.

If you schedule a meeting for an hour from now and send an e-mail to each attendee, the chance that all the attendee’s will read that message within the hour will be pretty small. On the other hand, if you schedule the meeting for the next day, the chance that they will read the message will be pretty high. Remember, e-mail is not designed for immediacy (that’s why you have a telephone), it’s designed for convenience.

Some (not all) e-mail systems have features that try to combat this problem. These features (usually called “notification”) will notify you when a person has received your e-mail and may also notify you when the person has read it (really all it can do is assume you that the person has looked at the first screen of the message — it has no way to know if the person has read the message word for word). Referring back to the example in the last paragraph, you could check to see who has checked their e-mail before the meeting and then telephone those who have not read it.

Newsgroups

If you have access to the Internet, you may have access to newsgroups. At the simplest level, a newsgroup is a collection of related e-mail messages tied to a specific topic. Some examples might be a newsgroup for users of Microsquish Word, a newsgroup for the fans of the works of Rita Mae Brown or a newsgroup for owners of handmade bicycles manufactured in Wisconsin. If you seen a list of the available newsgroups, which is now well over the 20,000 range, the topics are quite diverse and amazing.

Anyway, on to more important items….

Don’t call a newsgroup a anything but a newsgroup. They are not forums (that’s on Compu-Snore). They definitely are not BBS’s. They are newsgroups. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Before posting (think of it as sending an e-mail message) to a newsgroup, I would highly recommend that 1) you monitor it for a few days (called lurking) to make sure the newsgroup’s content is relevant to your interest, and 2) read the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section if there is one. FAQs usually will provide a statement of direction for the newsgroup along with any other guidelines for its usage. Following these two tenets will help you avoid that dreaded flame.

If you find that you want to post an entry to a newsgroup, make sure it’s the right group. Posting a message for help for Microsquish Word in the WordImperfect newsgroup won’t get you anywhere other than a possible flame (there’s that word again).

One last no-no for news groups is called “spamming”. Spamming is repeated posting the same message to a particular news group(s) for no other reason than to be obnoxious. This is definite flame bait.