Communicating by Email

This document is intended to help you to write email messages efficiently and correctly. Just as there are certain rules for hardcopy letter writing, electronic mail also has a sort of "netiquette" (Network Etiquette). This document is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions about communicating with email. The navigation bar at the bottom of the window will allow you to jump quickly from one topic to another.

Contents:

GENERAL

What is email?

Email, short for electronic mail, is a system in which a computer user exchanges messages with other computer users using a communications network. To use email, you must have access to a computer that is linked to a network, via a modem, phone line, fiber optic cable (Ethernet), or wireless. There are two types of email systems. Web mail, lets you use email from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser, e.g. SDM's Mail Access Center works this way, another example is Hotmail.com. The more traditional kind of email shows up in a separate email program, such as Outlook which is used at the SDM for staff and Faculty.

 

Why is email different from postal mail?

Electronic communication, because of its speed and broadcasting ability, is fundamentally different from paper-based communication. Because the turnaround time can be very fast, email is more conversational than traditional paper communications.
Despite the fact that electronic communication is more informal than printed text, you should put some effort into your writing style. Read your message carefully before you send it. Once you send it, you are committed.
However, because of the lack of vocal inflection, gestures, and shared environment, email is not as rich a communication method as a face-to-face or telephone conversation. Your correspondent may have difficulty telling if you are serious or kidding, happy or sad, frustrated or euphoric. (Sarcasm is particularly dangerous to use in email.) Thus your email message compositions should be different from both your speech and your paper compositions.

What is common to email and postal mail?

Follow chain of command procedures for corresponding with superiors. For example do not send a complaint via email directly to the president of the university just because you know his email address.

Also, do not copy other individuals on your email if it is not necessary. Copying tens and even hundreds of people on email is easy to do, but many times you only create junkmail in your recipients' mailboxes.

Are email messages strictly private?

email you write for business purposes or on your employer's equipment is owned by your employer. Never assume that your email message can be read by no one except yourself. Others may be able to read or access your mail. Never write anything to email that you wouldn't want to become public knowledge. Do not send your credit card number over email unless it is encrypted.

WRITING MESSAGES

Can you omit the subject line?

Never. A subject line that pertains clearly to the text of your email message is a good way to help recipients decide on whether and when to read your message. The subject line should be brief (as many mailers will truncate long subject lines) and does not need to be a complete sentence.
If you are responding to a message, your mailer should preface the subject line with "Re:" or "RE:" (for REgarding). If your mail program doesn't do this, it would be polite to put in the "RE:" manually.
If you are offering non-urgent information that requires no response from the other person, you can preface the subject line with "FYI:" (For Your Information).
For time-critical messages, prefacing the message with "URGENT:" is a good idea (especially if you know the person gets a lot of messages).

Should you flame in email messages?

A flame is a particularly nasty, personal attack on somebody for something he or she has written. Because people cannot see each other, they are often harsher than they would be in person. Try to avoid sending abusive, harassing, threatening, or bigoted messages. Be carefully what you say about others. email messages are easily forwarded.

What writing style is appropriate for messages?

Write clearly and carefully. Since you are writing a letter, be thoughtful, as you would be in a letter. Read carefully what you receive, to make sure that you are not misunderstanding the message.
Focus on one subject per message. Send a second email message if the subject is not related. You do not know if the recipient wants to forward the message to someone else for consulting.
We spend twelve to twenty years being rewarded for being verbose in our writing. (How many times when you were in school were you told to write a N-page paper?) This is not appropriate for email messages. The more people are getting the email message, the terser you should be. If they want more information, they can ask for it. (Also note that in some places, people get charged by the byte and/or have limits on how much disk space their email can use!) The rule of thumb is that you should try to keep everything on one screen.

Use shorter paragraphs than usual. Frequently email messages will be read in a document window with scrollbars. While scrollbars are nice, they make it harder to visually track long paragraphs. Consider breaking up your paragraphs into only a few sentences apiece.

Signature:
Include your signature at the bottom of any email message. Your signature should include your name, position, affiliation, and Internet address. Optional information could be include your address and phone number. See the example below.
 


--
Heiko Spallek, DMD, Ph.D.: hspallek@pitt.edu
Asst. Professor, Center for Dental Informatics
School of Dental Medicine
University of Pittsburgh
3501 Terrace Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Phone: (412) 648-8886
Fax: (412) 648-9960
http://di.dental.pitt.edu/
- Visit www.dental-computing.com, the Website for our upcoming new book "Computing in Dentistry."

Should you use caps for emphasis?

DO NOT USE ALL CAPS. They are hard to read and should be limited to single words which should be emphasized. If you emphasize a whole message it will not be longer an emphasis but a hurdle to read. Capitalized words are understood as "shouting". *Asterisks* surrounding a word also can be used to make a stronger point.

Should you quote the the original message when responding?

If you are responding to a message, only include the relevant part of the original message--NOT the whole message! Make sure you clearly refer to the original message's contents. Always include a descriptive subject line in your message, such as "About the lecture yesterday."

Example:
Instead of sending an email message that says:

yes

Say:

> Are you going to teach the class
> on Thursday?
yes

The ">" here is a relatively standard convention for quoting someone else's words.


How do you express emotion in messages?

A facial gestures can be represented with a "smiley": an ASCII drawing of a facial expression. The most common three are

:-)
;-)
and
:-(

(To understand these symbols, turn your head counter-clockwise 90 degrees.) While people will have slightly different interpretations of the exact difference between the upper two, common opinion is that the upper one means "I'm happy" and the lower one means "I'm kidding".

What are common email mistakes?

Can you have URLs of any length without fear of wrapping?

When you type a lengthy URL into a text message, it may break before it reaches your recipient. According to RFC2396, you should append the address with angle-brackets to alleviate problems.

Example: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q263/2/36.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=OWA%20logon%20interface&rnk=1&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=EXCH2K

Will Appear in an email as:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q263/2/36.asp?LN=EN-
US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=OWA%20logon%20interface&rnk=1&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=EXCH2K

But with angle brackets, the URL will keep the link together:

Example: <http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q263/2/36.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=OWA%20logon%20interface&rnk=1&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=EXCH2K>

Will Appear in an email

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q263/2/36.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=OWA%20logon%20interface&rnk=1&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=EXCH2K

Points to remember

  • Provide your audience with adequate context:
    • always include a subject line
    • quote from original message when replying
    • write short, concise messages
  • Be aware of page layout issues. Try to use:
    • short paragraphs
    • focus on one subject per message
    • lines under 60 characters
    • email messages under twenty-five lines

 

ATTACHING FILES

Can you use attachments?

Most mailers support "attachments", which allow you to specify a document to send with your mail. If recipients have an email reader which can handle attachments, this works very well. If they don't, they end up with a lot of garbage.
Make sure the receiver does not have file size limits for incoming mail or attachments, which may truncate your missive.

 

MAILING LISTS

What is important regarding mailing lists?

  • If replying to a mailing list message consider if the response is most appropriate for the entire group. If it is really meant for one person to read, send it via private email.

  • It is considered extremely rude to forward personal email messages to a mailing list without the author's permission.

  • Make sure the information you are sending is relevant for the particular list.

  • The address to which you send the subscription request and the address to which you send actual postings are usually different.

  • Remember when you make a posting, that in most cases your posting will be seen by hundreds of individuals.

  • Flaming will cause your expulsion from the list. This does not mean that high-spirited debate is not allowed, but personal attacks are not appropriate or tolerated in most lists.

  • Do NOT post file attachments to a mailing list. Sending attached files is a waste of network bandwidth and server time.

  • Commercial postings are forbidden on most of the professional mailing lists.



TECHNICAL QUESTIONS

What should you do if an email message comes back undelivered?

When an email address is incorrect in some way (the username is misspelled, the computer does not exist), the mail system will bounce the message back to the sender, much the same way that the Postal Service does. The message usually includes the reason for the bounce. A common error is addressing mail to an account name that doesn't exist. Read this message carefully, since you can often see what went wrong.

For example, writing to tschleyer@dental.pitt.edu will fail, if the recipients email address is titus instead of tschleyer: Here is the returned mail:

Date sent: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 10:04:36 -0500
From: UCX_SMTP@dental.pitt.edu
Subject: Returned mail

---- Transcript of session follows ----

%UCX-E-SMTP_SNDERROR, Error detected while sending mail to <tschleyer@dental.pitt.edu>
-MAIL-E-NOSUCHUSR, no such user !AS
---- Recipients of this delivery ----
<tschleyer@dental.pitt.edu> (bounced)

The message also includes the text of the mail, so you don't have to retype everything you wrote.

---- Unsent message follows ----
Return-Path: heiko@spallek.com
Received: by mail.dental.pitt.edu (UCX V4.0 VAX); Mon, 13 Jan 2003 10:04:33 -0500
Message-Id: <199701131506.KAA23039@uz.comcat.com>
From: "Heiko Spallek" heiko@spallek.com
To: tschleyer@dental.pitt.edu
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 10:05:10 +0000
Subject: test
Reply-to: heiko@spallek.com
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v2.42)

Hi Titus,

We ...

 

Should you encrypt email messages for privacy reasons?

Yes, you can. Most new email clients, including the email client delivered together with the Netscape Navigator 4.x or MS Internet Explorer 5.0, have built-in encryption capability.
For more information about encryption see http://www.pgp.com/

Is there additional information about email messages?

 

University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine. All contents copyright (C) 2003. All rights reserved.
Created: January 7, 2003      Revised: September 01, 2009
Center for Dental Informatics - Comments to author: cdi@pitt.edu