Email & Mailing List Tips: Did you get flamed your first time out? Were you shouting?

Email Program Settings Suggestions: Dumb Features, HTML, Replies, Personal vs. List, Basic Settings, Signatures

Writing and Layout Suggestions: Capitals, Paragraphs, URLs, Grammar, Proper addressing.

Message Content Suggestions: Urban Legends, Commands, Subjects, Quotes, Attachments, Topics, Civility.

How to get rid of SPAM

Grammar:Are you one of the many bright people who speak well but have trouble with the mechanics of writing: following those confusing rules concerning spelling, punctuating, capitalizing, etc.? Then this is the place for you.

Grammar Basics: Adjectives are modifiers, Adverbs, Alliteration, Clauses , Compound nouns, Conjunctions, Metaphors, Mondegreens, Noun, Phrases, Predicates, Prepositions, Pronouns, Proper nouns, Similes, Subjects,, Verbs, Voice.

Grammar Mistakes

Confusing Word Pairs

Abbreviations: Don't know what IMHO means?

Smileys/Emoticons: What to add a little personality to your emails?

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Send feedback about this page.

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EMAIL & MAILING LIST TIPS:

I realize that the internet and email is pretty new and unfamiliar to many people, so here are some suggestions which will help you be more effective with your electronic communication. Mailing lists come in two basic categories, announcement lists that the list owner uses to distribute articles and announcement. This type requires no interaction on your part. The other type allows you to communicate with many people about a common topic of interest. This is one of the most powerful tools the internet provides. But before jumping ahead and joining, you might want to read this page.

Email Program Settings Suggestions:

Dumb features: Turn off features (like VCards) that create attachments. Users of Netscape Communicator may find themselves sending VCard attachments without noticing. In Netscape Communicator, open the Preferences dialog box, switch to the Identity panel, and deselect "Attach my personal card to messages (as a VCard)" to avoid sending VCards with every message. Since most people still use email programs that don't understand VCards, VCard attachments tend to confuse or annoy recipients.

HTML: Avoid sending HTML-formatted messages to lists. Many email programs can't render HTML-formatted messages, and even as HTML support improves, there will be plenty of people who won't upgrade or who prefer to use programs that will never support HTML formatting. As with attachments there will be numerous people on almost any mailing list who won't be able to read your message as you intended. Worse, depending on how you've sent the message and on the email programs of the recipients, they may see the straight HTML markup. Some email programs generate HTML formatting by default, so you may have to change settings to prevent it. For the programs listed below, you will see the location of the formatting controls. Note that the arrow (->) is used as a shorthand notation indicating navigation, so the first item below would expand to:

"From the Special menu, choose Settings, then scroll down to the Styled Text settings panel."

Eudora Pro (Mac): Special -> Settings -> Styled Text

Eudora Pro (Windows): Tools -> Options -> Styled Text

Netscape Communicator (Mac/Windows): Edit -> Preferences -> Mail & Newsgroups -> Formatting

Outlook Express (Mac): Edit -> Preferences -> Message Composition

Outlook Express (Windows): Tools -> Options -> Send

Entourage (Mac): Edit -> Preferences -> Mail and News -> Compose

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Replies: Send replies either to the sender or the list, but not both.

Personal vs. List: Send personal emails to the individual's email address, not the entire list.

Basic Settings: Make sure the time is set properly on your computer.

Auto-Responders: Everyone is happy for you getting that long deserved vacation, however, having an auto response sent to everyone on the list is not only annoying, but can become an endless loop, clogging everyone's email box. If you must use an auto responder, then be sure to set it up to ignore mailing lists or set the mailing lists to no mail.

Signatures: Create a signature with your name and email address. Many people have too long signatures at the end of their messages. Email signatures are useful, but mailing list signatures should be kept to a minimum. This is especially true for lists that have digests because the signatures can take up a significant portion of the digest. For instance, messages with long signatures sent to the moderated Info-Mac Digest are rejected with a note asking the person to resend with a shorter signature. Many email programs let you switch between multiple signatures, but you have to remember to do so for each message.

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Writing and Layout Suggestions:

Capitals: You should NOT use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS in a normal email message. Caps are used to show emphasis only for one or two words and entire sentences in all caps is regarded as YELLING! (very rude)

Paragraphs: Insert blank lines between paragraphs.

URLs: Include full URL schemes: <http://www.covellichiro.com.com/> and surround URLs with angle brackets: <http://www.covellichiro.com.com/>

Grammar: Try to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Good writing isn't difficult, and requires only grammatical sentences and proper spelling. You don't need to be a professional writer or be able to make words flow trippingly off the tongue.

Proper addressing: The proper use of TO: CC: BCC: can save everyone some headaches.

TO: Use this when directly writing an email to someone.

CC: (Carbon Copy) Use this for an additional recipient that you want the main recipient to see. Like your attorney for legal documents.

BCC: (Blind Carbon Copy) Use this for an additional recipient that you DON'T want the main recipient to see. Use this when you are forwarding something to more than one person. Use this when you want to send a copy to a friend or attorney, but you don't want the recipient to know you did.

Here's what happens: When you receive an email, you see the TO: and the CC: recipients. You do not see the BCC: recipients. When you hit reply, your reply goes to the FROM: and CC:, but not the BCC: recipients.

Why do you care? Let's say you send an email to 20 people in your address book, using TO: or CC: Now, someone replies with a personal message to you, well it gets sent to all twenty people.

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Message Content Suggestions:

Urban Legends: Sometimes you'll get e-mail from an acquaintance with an important virus announcement, an interesting news item, facts you didn't know, or asking you to sign a petition to help a little girl dying of leukemia in Maskataslan. These messages are often interesting, always sound plausible, usually cite impeccable references, and are often untrue. They are known as "urban legends."

For example, how many of you have read how coca-cola can melt teeth within two days (false)? The petition to help the women of
Afghanistan whose civil rights have been eliminated (true, but the names are not being collected)?

Never forward these to a mailing list no matter how important you think it is, it is way too off-topic and before you forward it to everyone else you know, check out the facts at:
http://www.snopes.com/ or
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html

Commands: Never send any commands to a list, especially unsubscribe commands.

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Subjects: Create and maintain descriptive subject lines. When you receive messages from a mailing list, the first thing you see is the subject line. Which of these subject lines would you rather see on a mailing list devoted to, say, tropical fish?
> wondering
> Recommendations for fish that can live with cichlids
Unless your telepathic powers are better than mine, the first subject line tells you nothing. So, the first rule of subject lines is to make them descriptive. Another problem affects primarily digest readers. They see an interesting message and want to reply, but when they do so, their email program uses the subject line of the digest (Tropical Fish Digest #251) rather than the subject of the message. That leads to messages being sent to the list with useless subject lines, since the title of the digest is rarely descriptive. There's no good solution to this problem, although two mediocre workarounds exist.

Copy the subject line from the message to which you're replying and paste it into your reply's subject line, prefixing it with "Re:". This is effort well spent. or Have the digest sent as a MIME digest and use an email program like Eudora Pro that can separate the digest into individual messages in a mailbox. The problem goes away then, but, for some people, so does the point of receiving the digest version of a list.

Sometimes you want to reply to a message but change the topic of discussion. When you do that, you should change the subject line; if you don't, people following the thread will be confused when your message doesn't match its subject. Some people (and some programs) indicate when they've changed a subject line by appending "(was <the original subject>)" to the new subject. That's acceptable but results in long and unwieldy subject lines that work badly in list archives.

On the other side are people who change the subject lines on every message they send. That's equally problematic, since it prevents list members from reading (or sorting) messages that are related by a shared subject line. If you create descriptive subjects, maintain the correct subjects if you're a digest reader, and change subjects only when appropriate, you'll be well on your way to being admired as a paragon of list etiquette.

Quotes: Quote, but quote original text sparingly in your replies. When replying to a message that you received, you should "quote" the original text that was sent to you *(minus the previous senders signature and any irrelevant text)*. Most email software will do this for you automatically if you set it up in the preferences. Doing this will help the recipient remember the "flow" of the conversation. One of the biggest peeves with mailing lists is that people seldom delete unnecessary quoted text in their replies, with the worst being people who reply to a message in a digest and quote the entire digest. Quoting sparingly does require manual work, since most email programs automatically quote the original message in replies. But failing to edit the original wastes everyone's time and bandwidth. In some email programs, you can select some text in the original message, press a keyboard shortcut, and have only that text appear quoted in the reply. (Eudora for the Macintosh does this with its Command-Shift-R shortcut.) Other email programs assume that replying with some original text selected means you want to quote only that text. Especially problematic are email programs that quote an original message by appending it to the bottom of the reply with no quote marks in front of each line. That prevents inline replies, since there's no easy way to differentiate original and new text, so users of those programs tend to leave the entire original hanging off the end of the reply. That's fine in private messages, but in mail destined for a list, it's just sloppy. Unfortunately, the only solution to this problem is to switch to a different email program

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Attachments: Don't include email attachments unless explicitly allowed. In general, unless a list actively encourages the use of attachments to messages, you shouldn't send them. Most mailing lists consist of people using a variety of email programs under different operating systems. Then there are Web-based email clients, which may not be able to deal with attachments at all. Thus, it's likely that any attachment won't be readable by a significant percentage of people on the list. If you're thinking about attaching a file that contains primarily text, instead copy the file's content into the body of the message. Another problem with attachments is that many people send them without realizing that they've done so. Now that many email programs support inline graphics, people copy images into their messages without realizing that those images are in fact sent as attachments.

Topics: Don't send off-topic emails to a list. Another complaint about people's behavior on mailing lists revolves around "junk" messages. I'm not talking about spam, since spammers aren't constructive members of a mailing list. Instead, junk messages fall into the following categories:

1. Unsubscribe messages mistakenly sent by subscribers who didn't read (or locate) the instructions for leaving the list. Every list goes to lengths to simplify the process of signing off, and yet a large number of people still send unsubscribe messages to the list itself. Read and save the welcome message you receive when you subscribe to a list, then refer to it when you want to unsubscribe.
2. Me-too posts sent by well-meaning list members replying only to convey that they agree with a message or had a similar experience. A Web-based poll is a better way to take votes on a topic.
3. Welcome messages that appear when someone new joins the list. No one on a mailing list needs to read "Glad to have you on the list!" from everyone; send such messages to the new member in private mail.
4. Congratulation messages that appear after a member of the list has mentioned some milestone or personal triumph. Again, send these in private email.

The moral of the story is simple: Avoid sending junk messages to a list. They're easy to identify as you type - just ask yourself if the message would be of interest to the majority of the mailing list. If not, that doesn't mean your message is worthless: the original sender might appreciate being welcomed or congratulated via private email. For additional points, see here: http://www.SpamPrimer.com/#forwards

and lastly, ... Civility is always worthwhile.

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GRAMMAR: BASICS

Adjectives are modifiers. They describe nouns & specify size, color, number, etc., e.g., The small "x" in the upper corner of the window is used to exit your file.

Adverbs describe verbs, adjectives & other adverbs, e.g., The exhausted secretary screamed loudly as her monitor flickered slowly, then died.

Alliteration can give a pleasing sound to a sentence, as long as it's not overdone, e.g., World Wide Web . . . smelly, slimy SCSI . . . resonant ringing.

Clauses are groups of words with a subject and predicate. A main clause stands alone as a sentence; a subordinate clause is incomplete and is used with a main clause to express an idea. Main:I will play Tetris, Subordinate: when I have time.

Compound nouns usually form the plural by pluralizing the fundamental part of the word, e.g., attorneys general; spelling matches; vice presidents.

Conjunctions join words, phrases or clauses. Coordinating conjunctions: and, but, for, or, nor, either, neither, yet, so, so that. (Yet & so are also used as adverbs.) Subordinating conjunctions join two clauses (main and dependent/subordinate): although, because, since, until, while, etc.

Metaphors suggest comparison between two different things, e.g., Bill Gates has a heart of gold...His mind is a sharp razor.

Mondegreens: Misheard lyrics. Example: "Donuts Make my Brown Eyes Blue" rather than "Don't it Make my Brown Eyes Blue" or "Are you Going to Starve an Old Friend?" instead of "Are you Going to Scarborough Fair?" or "Ham on Rye" rather than Kenny Loggins "I'm alright."

Noun: The name of a person, place, thing, quality or action. Nerd, Bellingham, desk, truth, discovery, frustration.

Phrases are closely related words with no subject or predicate, and may be used as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs, e.g., Waiting for Technical Support has kept me at my desk all afternoon (noun). The typing could have been done earlier (verb). The person with the bleary eyes is a computer nerd (adjective). Buy memory chips now, since the price will go up soon (adverb).

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Predicates are one of two main components of a sentence. They are verbs and the words used to explain the action or condition. They always agree with the Subject, e.g., Choosing the right ISP can be a difficult process.

Prepositions show how nouns or pronouns relate to other words in a sentence, e.g., Little Susie rolled the $800 CD ROM into the bathroom; her mother hid behind the shower curtain, praying for self-control.

Pronouns are substitutes for nouns, e.g., Judy sat at her computer and opened WordPerfect. Suddenly, her mind went blank, so she contacted Luz Vergara, the WordPerfect Wiz.

Proper nouns form their plurals by adding s to the singular or es if the word ends in s, z, ch, sh, or zh, e.g., the Carolinas, Robinsons, Piersons, Judys, Joneses, Savages, Morrises.

Similes show a similarity between two things, using "like." Bill Prowell has a mind like a razor...After six hours at the computer, her eyelids felt like lead weights.

Subjects, one of two main components of a sentence, are nouns, pronouns, or phrases used as nouns, e.g., Choosing the right ISP can be a difficult process.

Verbs make things happen, show action or state of being & also indicate time of action or being, e.g., Jeff's son waved goodbye to the computer repairman (past). I need to shut down Windows (present). You will enjoy learning HTML (future).

Voice. Active is preferable to passive to create action and interest. Connie typed the letter (active). The letter was typed by Connie (passive). Sometimes, in certain types of scholarly and scientific documents, passive voice is preferred.

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Common Mistakes

A and An: "an historical book" is not idiomatic in American English. Before a pronounced (breathy) h, the indefinite article should be a. A hotel; a historical. Precede a word beginning with a "breathy" h with an a.

Due to or Because of? Due to modifies nouns and is generally used after some form of the verb to be (is, are, was, were, etc.). Jim Wilson's success is due to talent and spunk (due to modifies success, not talent).

Because of should modify verbs. Ted resigned because of poor health (because of modifies resigned).

Its or It's? This is one of the most common problem areas of our language, probably because possessives almost always use apostrophes. Its is an exception.

Its: The possessive form of the pronoun it is never written with an apostrophe, e.g., . . . read the book. "Its title is. . ." or, "What is its value?"

It's: contractions of it is and it has. It's time to go. It's been great.

Nauseous or Nauseated: Often used incorrectly, but don't get nauseating about its usage. Nauseous means sickening to observe: disgusting. Nauseated means sick to one's stomach. Pregnant women often experience nausea. When they describe the way they feel, they should say, "I feel nauseated," but if a pregnant woman says, "I feel nauseous," don't correct her grammar: give her a hug and some ginger ale! Timing is everything.

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Their, They're, or There? Their: possessive form of the word they, e.g., Their Web site is full of typos.

They're: Contraction of the words "they" and "are," e.g., They're doing a great job on their Web site.

There: at or in that place, e.g., "Now there is a stunning Web site.

Your or you're? This is probably the second most common problem area in our language.

You're: Contraction of the words "you are," e.g., "You're up for an award. Someone said you're leaving."

Your is a possessive form of a personal pronoun, e.g., "I like your Web site. Tom, thanks for giving your time to this effort."

Both: "Your knowledge of HTML shows that you're a dedicated designer."

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Confusing Word Pairs:

- Accept: receive..... Except: exclude

- Adverse: opposed..... Averse: not interested

- Affect: change, influence..... Effect: (v) to bring about (n) result, impression

- Appraise: value..... Apprise: inform, notify

- Lay: to set down, to place or put an item down..... Lie: to recline

- Principal: first in authority; main participant; amount of a debt less interest..... Principle: basic truth or assumption

- Ensure: to make sure or certain; guarantee; to protect..... Insure: to take out or issue insurance; to pay or be paid money in the case of loss..... Assure: convince, make sure of something, to give confidence; to declare or promise confidently

- Their: belonging to; possessive of "they" (another case where a possessive does not have an apostrophe)..... There: at, or in that place..... they're: combination of "they are"

- To: in the direction of; toward..... Too: in addition; as well, also..... Two: more than one; less than three

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ABBREVIATIONS

BFN = Bye, for now

BTW = By the way

FWIW = For what it's worth

g,d&r = grinning, ducking, and running

IIRC = If I recall correctly

IMCO = In my considered opinion

IMHO = In my humble opinion [the speaker is never humble]

LOL = Lots of laughs or Laughing out loud

OIC = Oh, I see!

OOTB = Out of the box

OTOH = On the other hand

OTTH = On the third hand

PITA = Pain in the "acronym"

ROFL = Rolling on the floor laughing

RSN = Real Soon Now

RTFM = Read the, uh, Friggin' Manual

TIA = Thanks in advance

TTFN = Ta, ta for now

WYSIWYG = What you see is what you get

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SMILEYS/EMOTICONS

Emoticon Meaning

-------- -------

:-] Smiley blockhead

:-( Drama, Sad

:-) Comedy, Happy, Smile

:-=) Older user with mustache

:-\ Undecided user, skeptical

:-p User is sticking their tongue out (at you!)

:-)8 User is well dressed, bowtie

:-D User talks too much

:-# User's lips are sealed.

:-o User is shocked, suprised, wowed

:-| No expression face, 'that comment doesn't phase me'

-:-) User sports a mohawk

:-& User which is tongue-tied

:-> Hey hey

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:-7 User after a wry statement

:-#| User with bushy mustache

:-@ User screaming

:-} User wears lipstick

:-x "my lips are sealed" Smiley

:-I Hmm

;-) Winking Smiley

(-: User is left-handed

(:)-) User likes to scuba dive

<|-)= User is chinese

=:-) User is a punk

8-| Suspense

(:-) Smiley big-face

X-| Death

B-) Horn-rims

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:-w Speak with forked tongue

:-[ Pouting

8-O "Omigod!!"

:^D "Great! I like it!"

:-: Mutant Smiley

[] Hugs and

:-* Kisses

>:) a little devil

::-) wears glasses

=|:-)= Abe Lincoln

:-)) double chin

C:-) Wears a helmet

:-() I stubbed my toe

:-( ) You stepped on my toe

:-( ) You backed your car over my toe

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SOME EMAIL LIST SERVERS:

Yahoo! Groups

Topica

Smartlist

Sparklist

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