Chapter 9
In This Chapter
Following the rules of email etiquette
Throwing away spam automatically
Responding to mail, or not
Keeping an email address book
Forwarding and filing mail
Sending and receiving exotic mail and mail attachments
Sorting and filtering your messages
After you get used to using email, you start sending and receiving enough messages that you had better keep it organized. This chapter describes how to delete, reply to, forward, and file messages in webmail systems such as Gmail and Outlook.com, smartphones and tablets, Outlook (which comes with Microsoft Office), and Apple Mail (which comes with Mac OS X). Refer to Chapter 8 to find out how to get started using these programs.
After you read (or decide not to read) an email message, you can deal with it in a number of ways, much the same as with paper mail. Here are your usual choices:
You can do any or all of these things with any message. If you don’t tell your mail program what to do with a message, it usually stays in your mailbox for later perusal.
Sadly, the Great Ladies of Etiquette, such as Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt, died before the invention of email. Here’s what they may have suggested about what to say and, more important, what not to say in email.
Email is a funny hybrid, something between a phone call (or voice mail) and a letter. On one hand, it’s quick and usually informal; on the other hand, because email is written rather than spoken, you don’t see a person’s facial expressions or hear her tone of voice.
Pointless and excessive outrage in email is so common that it has a name of its own: flaming. Don’t flame. It makes you look like a jerk.
When you’re sending email, keep in mind that the person reading it will have no idea what you intended to say — just what you did say. Subtle sarcasm and irony are almost impossible to use in email and usually come across as annoying or dumb instead. (If you’re an extremely superb writer, you can disregard this advice — but don’t say that we didn’t warn you.)
Another possibility to keep in the back of your mind is that it’s technically easy to forge email return addresses. If you receive a totally off-the-wall message that seems out of character for the person who sent it, somebody else may have forged it as a prank. (No, we don’t tell you how to forge email. How dumb do you think we are?)
People who don't believe that we are all part of a warm,
caring community who love and support each other are no
better than rabid dogs and should be hunted down and shot.
:-)
In our experience, any joke that needs a smiley probably wasn’t worth making, but tastes differ. For more guidance about online etiquette, see our net.gurus.org/netiquette web page.
Spam, unsolicited and unwanted bulk mail, is a scourge on the Internet. By most measures, upward of 90 percent of all mail is spam, which means that your mail provider has to filter out ten spam messages for every message it delivers. Spam filters work pretty well, but they aren’t perfect. Here are some suggestions about how to make your mail’s filtering closer to perfect.
Webmail systems try to identify spam and move it to a Junk or Spam folder.
If you see spam messages in your incoming mail, you can mark them as spam, which helps the webmail service identify this type of message in the future. From the list of messages, select the message and click the Spam, Report Spam, or Junk icon or link. If you find misfiled real mail in your junk folder, you can usually click a Not Junk or similar icon to “unreport” it.
The iPhone and iPad Mail app has an easy way to move a message to your Junk folder. Click the little flag icon and choose Move to Junk. Your mail server (Gmail, Outlook.com, etc.) may also do spam filtering before the messages even hit your inbox.
The Android apps for major mail systems such as Gmail and Outlook.com all have an option to mark a message as spam or junk, either as a button or a menu option. The regular email app lets you move mail to different folders. If your mail system provides a Spam or Junk folder, move the junk there.
Outlook has a Junk Email folder into which it puts anything it thinks is spam. You can look at what’s in it just as you use any other folder, by clicking it in the folder list in the left pane of the Outlook window.
When you get a spam message, right-click the message and choose Junk⇒Block Sender. Future messages from that sender will automatically move into the Junk folder.
Be sure to check your Junk Email folder every few days, in case a good message gets misfiled there. If you see a nonspam (“ham”) message in your Junk folder, right-click the message and choose Junk⇒Not Junk. Or choose Junk⇒Never Block Sender to “whitelist” the sender so that no future messages from that person are considered to be spam. You can whitelist an entire domain, too, by right-clicking a message from someone at the domain and choosing Junk⇒Never Block Sender’s Domain. This command can be useful if you’re doing business with an organization and you want to receive mail from anyone with an address at that organization’s domain.
Apple Mail has a simple but usable spam filter. To use it, follow these steps:
You should see the Junk Mail tab in the Mail Preferences dialog box.
You have your choice of leaving junk mail in your inbox marked as junk or moving it to the Junk mailbox. We suggest using the Move It to the Junk Mailbox option.
Select the box to exempt senders in your address book. Deselect the other two boxes, Previous Recipients and Messages Addressed Using Your Full Name — leaving these two boxes selected has caused plenty of junk to come our way.
Some providers mark junk but leave it in your inbox. This option tells Mail to use the markings to recognize junk.
To reply to a message, look for the Reply link or a leftward-pointing curved arrow icon that means the same thing. Pressing Ctrl+R (Command+R on the Mac) works in most mail programs, too. Some programs show a list of options that include Reply (which replies to the sender of the message), Reply All (which replies to everyone who was included on the original message), and Forward (described in the next section). Reply and Reply All create a new email message from you, preaddressed to the sender(s) and with the Subject line filled in with the subject of the original message plus something like “Re:” at the beginning. The text of the original message is included, too.
After you open the reply message, ask yourself two important questions:
Occasionally, you may receive a message that has been sent to a zillion people and their addresses appear in dozens of lines in the To section of the message. If you reply to a message such as this one, make sure that your reply isn’t addressed to the entire huge list of recipients unless that’s really what you want to do.
Some mail programs have a separate Reply All command or button that addresses your reply to the people that the message was from and the people who received copies of the message (the “To” people and the “Cc” people). Outlook and Apple Mail have the Reply All button on their toolbars. Webmail systems may make you choose it from a dropdown menu.
When you have the message headers straightened out, type your message above the quoted text from the original message and click Send.
After you begin using email, you quickly find that you have enough regular correspondents that keeping track of their email addresses is a pain. Fortunately, every popular email program provides an address book or contacts list in which you can save your friends’ addresses so that you can send mail to Mom, for example, and have it automatically addressed to [email protected]. You can also create address lists so that you can send mail to family, for example, and it goes to Mom, Dad, your brother, both sisters, and your dog, all of whom have email addresses.
All address books let you do the same things:
Some address books also provide space for you to store other information about your friends and coworkers.
Click the Address Book, People, or Contacts icon or link to see your address book. Most programs open a new window for your contacts list. In most address books, you double-click a contact’s name to edit the person’s information and click a New or Add link or icon to add a new friend.
Here’s how to add people to your address book:
Composing a message is a good time to use your address book, because who can remember all those weird email addresses your friends pick? When you’re writing a new message (or replying to or forwarding a message, as described later in this chapter), here’s what to do in all these systems:
Or, open the address book or contacts list, click the person to whom you want to write, and look for an envelope icon or something else that suggest sending them a missive. Clicking or double-clicking the person’s email address might do it, too. (Sorry to be vague, but these services redesign their web pages so often that even veteran users have to figure things out all over again from time to time.)
You can forward email to someone else. It’s easy. It’s cheap. Forwarding is one of the best things about email and at the same time one of the worst. It’s good because you can easily pass along messages to people who need to know about them. It’s bad because you (not you personally, but, um, people around you — that’s it) can just as easily send out floods of messages to recipients who would just as soon not hear another press release from the local Ministry of Truth or another joke that’s making the rounds. Think about whether you will enhance someone’s quality of life by forwarding a message to him. If a message says “Forward this to everyone you know,” do everyone you know a favor and delete it instead.
Forwarding a message involves wrapping the message in a new message of your own, sort of like putting sticky notes all over a copy of it and mailing the copy and notes to someone else.
Forwarding mail is almost as easy as replying to it: Select the message and click the Forward button or link, or the right-pointing arrow. The mail program composes a message that contains the text of the message you want to forward; all you have to do is address the message, add a few snappy comments, and send it.
The text of the original message appears at the top or bottom of the message, usually formatted as quoted text and preceded by a line that specifies whom the original message was from, and when. You then get to edit the message and add your own comments.
Saving email for later reference is similar to putting potatoes in the fridge for later. (Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it — day-old boiled potatoes are yummy with enough butter or sour cream.) Lots of your email is worth saving, just as lots of your paper mail is worth saving. Lots of it isn’t, of course, but that’s what the Delete icon is for.
You can save email in a couple of different ways:
The easiest method usually is to stick messages in a folder. Webmail and mail programs usually come with folders named In (or Inbox), Outbox, Sent, and Trash, and perhaps others. But you can also make your own folders.
People use two general approaches in filing mail: by sender and by topic. Whether you use one or the other or both is mostly a matter of taste. For filing by topic, it’s entirely up to you to come up with folder names. The most difficult part is coming up with memorable names. If you aren’t careful, you end up with four folders with slightly different names, each with a quarter of the messages about a particular topic.
Webmail systems change every time the company decides to redesign the website, but here’s how the Gmail and Outlook.com worked the last time we checked.
Your folders appear in the list of folders down the left side of your browser window (Figure 9-1 shows Gmail’s list). Your folders include names such as Inbox, Sent, Draft, Spam (or Junk), Archive, and Trash (or Deleted). Click a folder name to see the messages in that folder. To save a message in a folder, drag the message from the list of messages into the folder.
To create a new folder in Outlook.com, right-click (Command-click or right-click on the Mac) the Folders title at the top of the list of folders, then choose Add a New Folder.
In Gmail, rather than put mail into folders, you label it. All mail with the same label acts sort of like a folder. Click the Labels icon (which looks like a little luggage tag) and choose from the list. If you’re creating a new label, click the Labels icon and choose Create New.
On an iPhone or iPad, when you are looking at a message, a Folder icon appears at the bottom (iPhone) or top (iPad) of the screen. Click it to see a list of folders to which you can move the message. On Android mail, there is a file folder icon at the top or bottom of the screen which you tap to see the list of folders. If you want to create a folder, do it on your computer.
Outlook starts with a bunch of folders, including Inbox, Deleted Items, Drafts (messages you haven’t sent yet), Junk Email, and Sent Items. They appear indented under your mailbox name (the name you gave when you configured Outlook for your email account; for example, Mailbox – Margy Levine Young). You can create a new folder by right-clicking the mailbox name and choosing New Folder from the menu that appears. You can also make folders within folders: Right-click any folder to make a folder inside it.
To move a message from one folder to another, just drag it from its current location onto the name of the folder where you want to store it.
What other people call folders, Apple calls mailboxes. To make a new one, choose Mailbox⇒New Mailbox. You might be able to choose the location of the mailbox (on your Mac, or with the rest of the mail in your mail account). Enter the name of the new mailbox and click OK.
To move a message, click on the message in the message list and drag it to the mailbox where you want it to go.
Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, email contained only text, with no formatting. Good old Courier font was good enough for us! But nowadays, email can be as all-singing, all-dancing as web pages, with formatting, pictures, and even video. Sooner or later, someone will send you a picture you just have to see, or you will want to send a video clip of Fluffy to your new best friend in Paris. To send stuff other than text through the mail, you can attach a file to your message or include a link to something on the web.
When you receive an email with pictures, your mail program usually displays the pictures right in the email. When you receive a file attachment, your mail program shows the name of the file, and you can click it to open it. This happens with pictures, too, if the image format is too exotic for your mail program to display.
You can save an attached picture or file for later use; most programs let you right-click the picture and choose Save Image As to put the picture in the folder of your choice. Then you can use it just like you use any other file.
These types of files are often sent as attachments:
Many mail systems limit the size of email messages, including attachments, to something like 4MB. Your ISP or webmail service may also place a limit on the size of your mailbox (the place on its server where your messages are stored until you pick them up). You may run into a size limit if someone sends you a truly gigantic file, such as a video file.
If you receive an attachment on your smartphone, you may want to wait to open it until you’re reading the message on your computer, where you’re more likely to have the program required to open the attached file.
Before you send someone a file, think about whether they will be able to open it. Almost everyone can open a photo or PDF file, but not everyone has Microsoft Word or other programs needed to open document files.
To attach a file to your message, just drag the file from the Windows Explorer or Finder window and drop it on the message. Or, click the Attach, Insert, or paper clip link and choose the file to attach.
On an iPhone or iPad, you send a file from the program that handles that file. For example, to send a picture, open the Photos app and display the photo you want to send. Touch the Send icon in the lower left corner of the screen. You have a number of choices for how to send the photo, as shown in Figure 9-3; choose Mail to create an email message with the photo attached. Then address and send the message as usual. It may ask what size photo you want to send (small, medium, or large). Choose based on how important picture quality is to you for this photo, and whether you are paying for data transfer from the device.
If you receive a message with attached files, you see the filenames at the top or bottom of the message. A paper clip may indicate that a file came along for the ride. You can double-click or touch a filename to open it and then save it where you want it.