Email has become one of the standard methods for electronic communications (it has been the academic standard for decades), but in the rush to make it ‘easy to use’, a lot of useful features have taken a back seat.
Many of these can save time and effort, and make life easier and more productive for you and the people you send email to. By contrast, although everyone suffers from annoying or damaging email, most people rarely get to see the trouble that their own [ab]use of email can cause to others. Behaving as a well-dressed network citizen means observing the ‘netiquette’ that marks you out as a productive and useful member of the electronic community.
Here are some tips to make life easier for you and the rest of the campus (and the world), and increase your kharma as a considerate and valued email user. You should definitely read the Email Charter (10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral).
You may also like to read the Senior Technical Officer's advice on Spam Avoidance in order to keep your mailbox free of spam.
11 February 2016 (rev 6)
Links: Your own mailer • Outlook Web Access (staff) • GMail (students) • IMAP
3. Using threads
Email messages are prefixed by a number of ‘headers’, like an old-fashioned paper inter-office Memo. As well as the familiar To, From, and Subject that you see on every message, there are headers to let you send messages to groups of people (see section 5.3, ‘Use the right headers’); and dozens of hidden headers that let you navigate through your mailbox and which are also used to direct your email across the Internet.
Most email interfaces, both web-based and stand-alone, can present your email in chronological order, but can also ‘thread’ the messages so that each original message is followed by all the replies, even though they arrived over a span of time along with other messages about different topics.
Contrary to what you might think, the Subject header is not used to organise threads, except by some very poorly written systems, because over time you might have several different conversations with the same subject. Instead, every message is given a Message-ID header with a globally unique ID for your message. And every reply to your message quotes this ID in an In-Reply-To header, and possibly in a References header too.
So when someone replies to an email message, the ID of the original message is used in the reply, and the email programs use this to arrange them to display together, in order, even though they have arrived at different times. This is why it's essential to click only when you are actually replying to the subject. If you just want to mail the sender about something else, click or and of course give it a different subject.
If you click are start a new message about something completely different, even if you change the Subject header, the message will end up in their mailbox threaded to the original conversation, and they might miss it.
Equally, if you click or to send a reply, and laboriously retype the subject, the message will not be attached to the original thread when it arrives in their mailbox. Instead, it will start a new thread of its own, even though it may have the original Subject header.
Getting this wrong (or using an incompetently-designed email program) is probably the biggest single reason that email ‘goes missing’. It hasn't gone missing at all, of course: it's been threaded wrongly because the headers are wrong because the wrong button was clicked.
It is of course possible to see all the headers if you want, especially if you are trying to diagnose a problem and the HelpDesk asks you to send them so they can work out what's happening (see section 5.7, ‘Forwarding messages with all headers intact’).
: Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels (1997).
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, Electronic Publishing Unit • 2018-08-01 • (other) |
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