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Send Me E-Mail

Copyright © 1999-2005, 2007, 2008 by David E. Ross

But, before you send me E-mail, please read the following:

• I made it easy for you to send me E-mail by putting my actual address at the top of this Web page and an E-mail link in the middle of the page. Please return the courtesy by putting a reciprocal address or link on your Web page. Note that the link is to an actual E-mail address, not a Web page form. I most definitely prefer using real E-mail, with which I keep a copy of whatever I send and which I can address to more than one recipient.
• Before sending a message with an attached file, ask me if I will accept the message.
• Although I occasionally send mass-mailing messages to friends and family, I never send spam. If you invite E-mail from me, please ensure you can receive it. Whether you use a local spam filter on your own computer or subscribe to an external anti-spam service, it is your responsibility — not mine — to unblock my E-mail address. I will not take the effort to register with a service or otherwise authenticate the non-spam nature of my messages.
• You may indeed disagree with my comments in one of my Web pages or in a message I posted to a newsgroup. But you should disagree without being disagreeable. If you do not know the difference, do not send me E-mail.
• While I can receive HTML-formatted E-mail, I really prefer plain ASCII text. Right-justified text, colored type, fancy fonts, gratuitious graphics, et cetera all demonstrate not how clever you are but how annoying you are. More important, HTML formatting consumes too much space and too much bandwidth, can be a source of computer viruses, and might be rejected by spam filters. For details, see my ASCII E-Mail Only.
• Unless you request otherwise, I reserve the right to quote on my Web pages all or part of any plain-text message I receive. (Unencrypted, plain-text messages are the Internet equivalent of post cards, easily read by strangers.) I will always obscure the identity of the originator of any quoted message, especially the originator's E-mail address. If you do not want me to publicly quote you, let me know. Similarly, I reserve the right to forward your plain-text message to other individuals without obscuring your identity or E-mail address. Messages that I receive with PGP encryption, however, I will keep confidential unless we both explicitly agree to make all or part public.
• Sometimes, I receive a message with a warning similar to the following:

  CONFIDENTIALLY NOTICE: This e-mail communication and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information for the use of the designated recipients named above. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message.

  This warning is meaningless. As indicated above, "confidential and privileged information" should be encrypted before sending over the Internet. Your prohibition cannot be enforced. If you sent a restricted message to me by mistake, that is your error for which you must suffer the consequences. You cannot foist blame onto me for your mistake when I disclose your message to others.
• I never, never participate in chain letters, via either E-mail or postal mail. No matter how noble the cause, I always discard chain letters — even those that do not request money — without forwarding them.

Send Me E-mail

Attachments

Files attached to an E-mail message can be quite handy, or they can be disastrous. This is a very easy way to send a picture or useful software application. This is also the primary method of spreading computer viruses. Because of that risk, I trash — unopened — any unexpected attachments and the messages to which they were attached. This includes vCard files (extension .vcf), which I always delete without opening them.

Aside from the risk of a virus, attached files can create other problems. E-mail messages are usually queued on a mail server in the order they were received. Before you can download newer messages from the server, you must first download older messages — and their attachments — that you have not yet seen. That is, until a message and its attachment are downloaded, you cannot access any subsequent messages. Further, some E-mail clients will lock while downloading, preventing you from reading or composing messages while you wait for a large attachment. To avoid these problems, I truncate any message more 50 KB (including attachments), leaving the rest on my ISP's server. What remains on the server, I often delete without reading.

Therefore, instead of attaching files to an E-mail message, you should consider making the files available through a Web or FTP server, from which the files can often be downloaded more quickly than through a mail server. Also, many FTP and Web clients have excellent recovery capabilities that allow them to resume from where they were interrupted if an Internet connection fails.

At the least (especially when you have no access to a Web or FTP server), first send an E-mail message without an attachment to ask whether your recipient is interested in receiving the attachment. Then, if you do attach a file to a message, indicate in the message what is in the attachment. Also, you should specify the type of file you have attached, either in terms of the application that uses it (e.g.: Word, Excel, Acrobat) or in terms of its file-type (e.g.: PDF, ASCII Text, JPEG). Do not make me examine the file extension to learn what kind of file you sent me. If the format of a file varies according to the version of the application that created it, the version must be indicated (e.g.: Word 7, Excel 97); this is never revealed by the extension.

For another opinion about E-mail attachments, see Larry Magid's The curse of attachments.

Further Suggestions

When you send E-mail to anyone:

• Break your message into paragraphs separated by blank lines.
• Consider using a spell-checker. However, recognize that a spell-checker does not know the difference between now and not or between shudder and shutter. Therefore, you must not surrender judgement to the computer. (See my Malaprops and Other Writing Problems regarding how spell-checkers fail when a valid word is used in the wrong context.)
• Spend some time proofreading, not only for spelling but also for grammar and punctuation. No, I am not perfect. I too misspell words, use commas idiosyncratically, and adhere to strange grammatical rules. But I can comprehend your thoughts easier if I am not distracted by illiterate text that does not even make complete sentences.
• In general, compose your message as if (without regard to its contents) it were going to be posted publicly with your name attached. Would you be proud of how it looks and reads? While some claim the content is everything and the form is nothing, I give more respect to a well-written, literate message than to unstructured, stream-of-consciousness dreck.
• Embedded URLs should be bracketed by [ and ] (square brackets) or by < and > (angle brackets). This keeps adjacent punctuation from becoming part of a URL. It also helps to delineate a long URL that might become broken onto two or more lines.

  The standard (RFC 3986, Appendix C) states:

  Using <> angle brackets around each URI [URL] is especially recommended as a delimiting style for a reference that contains embedded whitespace.

  For example, this page is at <http://www.rossde.com/mail_to_me.html>. However, I know that some Web-mail capabilities have problems with < and > in a message; therefore, I'll accept [ and ].

  Messages that I send comply with the standard, which is recognized by most E-mail applications and even by such Web-mail capabilities as Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. AOL's proprietary E-mail application does not recognize URLs embedded in my ASCII messages. Also, the Web-mail capabilities used by some ISPs to allow their users to access E-mail remotely corrupts URLs embedded in ASCII messages. Since I comply with the standard, that is a problem with those applications and not my problem. I will not change how I send messages to accommodate faulty implementations of the standard.

• If you must send an E-mail message with an attachment (despite my tirade), make sure you know how. I finally convinced my son to stop sending me supposedly humorous executables that always arrived garbled. No, this is not a problem with my PC; before I retired, I sent files back and forth between my home and my office, where I had a different E-mail application at each end.
• Since before most Internet users were born, I have been a strong supporter of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the freedom of speech it guaranties. This freedom is meaningless if it only applies to opinions with which I agree or if it applies only to me. The scope of the First Amendment includes all opinions, no matter how contrary they are to my personal beliefs, no matter who expresses them, or how they are expressed.

  However, I own my PC; and I personally pay for my Internet connection. Therefore, your freedom of speech does not require me to download, store, or read messages that are insulting, rude, or illiterate. Further, I too have a freedom of speech, which I can exercise in replying to any message you send to me. And I am not the only person who has this attitude.

• I never munge my E-mail address in E-mail messages. (I always munge it in newsgroup messages.) If you want serious consideration of what you write, you too should not munge your address. I will not bother to follow instructions for reconstructing your address. There is no point in obscuring your address in an E-mail, which is not publicly posted in the way newsgroup messages are posted.

Last updated 26 March 2008

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