Email

Practitioners' Views About the Use of Business Email Within Organizational Settings: Implications for Developing Student Generic Competence

Although extensive research has been done on teaching emails and on the use of emails in organisations, little research exists about how to incorporate organizational practitioners' views as the voices of the community of social practice. To remedy this pedagogical gap, this article uses a genre approach to discuss organizational practitioners' views on the use of email in organizational settings. It also develops seven teaching and learning stages for situated learning and teaching in business communication based upon the presented study findings.

Ars Dictaminis Perverted: The Personal Solicitation E-mail as a Genre

Phishing e-mails deceive individuals into giving out personal information which may then be utilized for identity theft. One particular type, the Personal Solicitation E-mail (PSE) mimics personal letters—modern perversions of ars dictaminis (the classical art of letter writing). In this article, I determine and discuss 19 appeals common to the PSE. These appeals were established first by conducting generative rhetorical analysis, then by volunteer coding, on 170 e-mails collected over a 12-month period. After defining these categories, I show how these letters are excellent twenty-first century teaching tools for pathos-based argumentation, logical appeals, the creation of ethos, and kairos in the development of perceived exigency.

Web Writing for Email

Learning about writing for the web has made me a better email communicator and project manager. Email would be much more effective if content was broken out in easy-to-understand sections with a clear guide for next steps at the end.

Is Your Email Businesslike — or Brusque?

Anyone whose ever been part of an online "flame war" has had the experience of a tiny "e-mole" becoming a mountain. Studies have shown that readers add (or invent) emotional bias that is often counter to your intent as the sender. In this case, all of the niceties you thought you were writing ended up sounding very different in the mind of your employee.

Does Email Communication Increase Participation in Organizational Decision Making?

One of the main issues crossing the fields of organization theory, communication theory, and information technology is whether email communication does increase participation in decision making. Common sense and some case studies suggest the so-called "democratization argument": since email allows direct (non-filtered) communication between people and identity/status concealment, it enhances more freely and easy participation in decision making.

Summarizing Email Conversations with Clue Words

Accessing an ever increasing number of emails, possibly on small mobile devices, has become a ma jor problem for many users. Email summarization is a promising way to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a new framework for email summarization. One novelty is to use a fragment quotation graph to try to capture an email conversation. The second novelty is to use clue words to measure the importance of sentences in conversation summarization. Based on clue words and their scores, we propose a method called CWS, which is capable of producing a summary of any length as requested by the user. We provide a comprehensive comparison of CWS with various existing methods on the Enron data set. Preliminary results suggest that CWS provides better summaries than existing methods.

Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages

Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential.

Managing Email Overload

One of the most fundamental tools used in any form of e-business is email, but most of us don't really think about it - we just use it out of habit, not with any real plan. And as business becomes ever busier it's easy to become inundated with email and fall so far behind that it becomes useless and customers get frustrated with lack of responsiveness.

The History of Attachment Security in Outlook, Part 1

A partial history of why Outlook has so, so many viruses communicated using it, and how people at Microsoft thought to try and stop it. A study of why minor patches can't repair major architecture issues.

Configuring Information Rights Management for Messaging in Outlook 2003

Information Rights Management (IRM), a new feature in Microsoft® Office 2003, can help prevent sensitive information from being distributed to or read by people who do not have permission to access the content. In Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, users can create and send e-mail messages with restricted permission to help prevent messages from being forwarded, printed, or copied and pasted. Microsoft Office 2003 documents, workbooks, and presentations that are attached to messages with restricted permission are automatically restricted as well.

Ten Tips For Your First Email Campaign

I’ve seen too many web designers dive into their first email marketing project before doing the proper planning. There are some basic things you need to square away before you send your first email newsletter.

The Use of Electronic Mail in Biomedical Communication

Publication in general medical journals stimulates more conventional than electronic mail. However, the content of e-mail may be of greater scientific relevance. Electronic mail can be encouraged without fear of diminishing the quality of the communications received.

Changing Uses of Technology: Crisis Communication Responses in a Faculty Strike

This case study of a faculty strike examines the crisis response strategies of a university and its faculty union and the changing uses of technology to communicate to key stakeholders. An analysis of the types of crisis response strategies reveals that both the university and the faculty union used defensive and ingratiation strategies to build their cases and protect their reputations. The university also used denial to argue that the strike was not disrupting operations. The university and the union both relied on e-mails, Web sites, and press releases to update their constituencies. The difference was that for the union in particular, technology both expanded the options for sending information and accelerated the flow of information when conditions changed. The case study illustrates that technology has diminished an organization's control of crisis communication by opening numerous communication channels for others to use to explain their positions and build support.

HTML Emails: Taming the Beast

Should you use CSS or (horror of horrors) tables? And what do you do when images are ‘blocked’?

Six Tips for Effective E-Mail

Who to target with your email, how long it should be, and what should and shouldn't go in it so that it can be an effective means of communication for you.

Using E-mail To Make Your Pitch

Gone are the days when you called a reporter, mailed a letter or sent a fax and expected to get a callback. These days, more reporters than ever are relying on e-mail to review news pitches or story ideas. Pitching by e-mail is sometimes more difficult than sending a pitch letter by standard mail or calling a reporter on the telephone, because with more and more e-mail being sent these days, yours needs to stand out from the rest. Here are tips on how to make your pitch stand out in the maze of e-mail communications that reporters, and other media contacts, receive each day.

A Marketplace for Attention: Responses to a Synthetic Currency Used to Signal Information Importance in E-Mail

The productivity of information workers is jeopardized by too much e–mail. A proposed solution to e–mail overload is the creation of an economy that uses a scarce synthetic currency that senders can use to signal the importance of information and receivers can use to prioritize messages. A test of the virtual economy with corporate information workers showed that people in a large company used different amounts of the currency when sending e–mail messages, and that the amount of currency attached to messages produced statistically significant differences in how quickly receivers opened the messages. An analysis of the network of virtual currency trades between workers showed the different roles that participants played in the communication network, and showed that relationships defined by currency exchanges uncovered social networks that are not apparent in analyses that only examine the frequency, as opposed to the value of interactions.

You Can't E-Mail Face Time—Employees Want Bosses Up Close and Personal

Face time. According to the fourth annual survey of the North American workplace, from Netherlands-based staffing organization Randstad, those two words best describe the most preferred way for employers to communicate with employees. The 2003 Employee Review is based on findings from 2,826 telephone interviews conducted by RoperASW, making it one of the most extensive employee attitude surveys conducted in the U.S. “E-mail is far behind face-to-face meetings as the means of communication most preferred by employees,” said Joanne Reichardt, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs for Randstad North America. “In short, everyone wants face time.”

Is E-Mail Still Effective?

With recent press surrounding the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act and possible future charges for sending e-mail as well as virus creators competing with each other for infection rates, how can you ensure that your e-mail communications are still effective and reach their intended recipients? E-mail has qualities that make it an ideal communication vehicle. But for all of these positive characteristics, e-mail has taken a serious blow over the past six years. An anti-spam technology company estimated that 62 percent of all e-mail sent across the Internet was identified as some sort of spam by users of their technology.

Is Spam Ordinary Commercial Speech?

An informal poll within the U.S. indicates that more than half of respondents favor a law restricting "spam," that is, unwanted electronic advertising that everyone with an e-mail address has been exposed to but does not know how to stop. In the poll, 30 percent favor making false e-mail headers illegal, but only slightly more than 11 percent said spam restrictions would violate the First Amendment.

Legal Issues Involved in Monitoring Employees' Internet and E-Mail Usage

Many employers have determined that there is a need to monitor employees' computer usage. According to a 2003 survey by the American Management Association, more than half of U.S. companies engage in some form of e-mail monitoring. Often, this is in addition to monitoring work-related communications and activities—including reviewing Internet usage, videotaping the work-site or recording employee telephone calls. More and more employers are engaging in some form of monitoring. Unfortunately, without a full understanding of the risks, employers may open themselves up to potential lawsuits. In addition, such techniques may result in low morale among employees who resent being told that they cannot use e-mail for personal messages and feel that their every move is being monitored.

Old Claims with a New Twist: E-Harassment in the Workplace

Many companies carry out portions of their business via an intranet or the Internet. Other companies grant access to the Internet to some, if not all, employees. The ease with which these systems allow employees to communicate with each other and with the outside world presents obvious business advantages. Unfortunately, employers now realize that the advantages gained by these technologies bring with them the risk of a new wave of harassment claims based on the alleged misuse of these modes of communication. In order to reduce these claims, or at least attempt to minimize exposure to such claims, employers will have to adjust to meet the new dynamics of a changing workplace.

Privacy Laws and Communication

With the advent of the Internet and the ability to send personal information to many places in very little time, privacy has become an important issue for businesses across the globe. How to retain the free flow of information without violating an individual’s right to privacy is a difficult balance to strike and one that different countries approach in various ways.

Using E-Mail as a Management Tool

We’ve all heard stories about people who clicked “send” too soon. But here’s a story you may not have heard. One of our clients described an e-mail message he recently received from upper management at his company. The message had some information about how to request annual leave and plans to landscape the building. The message ended with these words: “By the way, you have a new boss. The product development team’s new director will be James Yang. Margie Esposito, the former director, left last Friday.” Obviously, the cardinal rule of using e-mail as a management tool is “know when to use e-mail.” Some messages, like a sudden change in upper management, should be delivered in person.

With the Latest Software, Track How Your Readers are Interacting With Your E-Newsletter

While webmasters have long been able to study how site visitors interact with a web site, e-mail has been more elusive. No more. With the latest generation of smart e-mail software, marketers can now essentially look over the shoulders of their readers, seeing first-hand what works, what needs improvement and what is simply falling on deaf ears.

Are You Guilty of Sloppy E-mails? It Can Cost You

Some of the nicest people we know send the most thoughtless e-mails. Many are telegraphic, with a smattering of disconnected words and abbreviations, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. Most are dashed off without review and arrive in their native state: confusing, grammarless and brimful of spelling errors. That's not even to mention lack of logic and transitions.

The Effect of Typeface on the Perception of Email

This study investigated the effect that a font has on the reader's perception of an email. Based on a previous study by Shaikh, Chaparro, and Fox (2006), a sample email message was presented in three fonts (Calibri, Comic Sans, and Gigi). The three chosen fonts represented a high, medium, and low level of congruency for email messages. The least congruent typeface (Gigi) resulted in different perceptions of the email document and its author. However, no significant differences were found between the moderately and highly congruent fonts.

Computer Networks and the Technical Writer

Electronic mail and the computer networks it travels over provide new tools for the fechnical writer to use in researching, composing, and submitting documents. Over these networks, the writer can query authors, seek guidance from other professionals, browse through electronic libraries, and exploit other information resources to aid the writing process.

A Theoretical Approach to Using Electronic Mail or Why Doesn't Anyone Respond to My E-Mail

The features of time, place, speaker, and audience define the situational context of any communication--face-to-face, paper-based, or electronic. However, they are significantly altered in electronic communication. If participants in electronic communications do not recognize how these features are altered they may not be able to use their electronic mail effectively.

Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation

Most e-mail obfuscation techniques I've tried tend to be bothersome and time-consuming to implement because they have to be applied to each and every e-mail address that you want to protect. Most require you to use lengthy inline script elements and inline event handlers. They may also invalidate your markup.

E-Mail is Dead

What did the kids say? Email is dead. It's hanging on as a mode of communication for adults (that's us) and within businesses. Kids will even use it to communicate with adults. But for the majority of kids, email has been replaced by two things: text messaging and social networks.

A Generational Approach To Using Emoticons As Nonverbal Communication

The purpose of this article is to help determine whether the use of emoticons in computer mediated communication (CMC) are truly nonverbal cues. A review of the literature revealed that the traditional nonverbal theorists failed to predict the future employment of nonverbal cues in electronic CMC. A variety of emoticons are then described including the traditional happy face 3 and sad face 3, numerous variations of faces employing keyboard keys, a number of abbreviations commonly in use, and FLAMING. Inasmuch as emoticons are presently in widespread though informal use, the problem of how and what business communication instructors should teach about emoticons is discussed. The conclusion reached is that of a generational recipient determinism. It is recommended that recipients who are Traditionalists (born before 1946) should not be sent e-mail with emoticons; those who are Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) probably should not be sent e-mail with emoticons; those who are Generation Xers (those born between 1964 and 1980) may be sent e-mail with some of the more common emoticons; and those who are termed Millenials (born after 1980 and coming of age after 2000) may be sent e-mail with generous use of emoticons.

The Human Side of the Digital Divide: Media Experience as the Border of Communication Satisfaction With Email

Electronic mail (email) has rapidly become one of the most prominent communication media, and a substantial amount of information is processed by it in the contemporary workplace. It is well known that digital technology produces a "digital divide." In addition, it is well examined that the digital divide produces cognitive differences (e.g., knowledge gaps) among users. Yet, little is known about affective disparities. In addition, few studies on the digital divide were undertaken in organizational setting. This study considers the human side of the digital divide in an organizational setting and investigates if the digital divide exists in the workplace by examining multiple dimensions of communication satisfaction. The data from 303 university employees indicates that email experience differentiates communication satisfaction with amount of email and email use for equivocal tasks.

The Influence of E-Mail as an Interoffice Communication Tool in Small Organizations

E-mail has significantly impacted the way we communicate in business, possibly going so far as to affect the social structure of organizations. One under-explored effect of e-mail is how it impacts communication in smaller organizations. Given the ability of regular face-to-face interaction, is e-mail necessary to boost communication? A report of employee attitudes in one small business did provide an opportunity to observe the impact of e-mail on communications and employee attitudes. As a result, it is suspected that interoffice e-mail may serve to link formal and informal communication channels, particularly in terms of including managers to the informal communications network.

Every Email You Send is a Customer Service Email

If you do business online, there are times when you send your customers, prospects and subscribers an email or two. The emails you send tend to fall within one of three categories. Each of these three types of emails requires a slightly different approach. Their purposes are different, and each should be optimized to perform their respective tasks.

Where is Email 2.0? And Why is Commercial Email So Boring?

I don't recall the last time I received a commercial email that made me take notice or smile.

Why "Best Buddy" Emails Work So Well. Sometimes.

The best buddy approach works within specific product and service sectors, where readers can easily be tripped into a state of dissociation...because they have problems that the writer promises to solve.

Communicating Across Cultures by E-mail: Advice for Consultants

E-mail styles and preferences can vary from country to country, presenting a possible challenge to effective communication. Read on for how to add a personal touch to your messages so that e-mail becomes an asset to your business.

Avoid the Use of Familiar Phrases and Messages in Your Emails

Sometimes copywriters and content writers write in clichés. To a reader, the line has barely any meaning, and certainly no impact. Why not? Because it is too familiar. Because he or she has read the same phrase so many times before, in too many other places.

Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion

Newsletter usability has increased since our last study, but the competition for users' attention has also grown with the ever-increasing glut of information.

The End of E-Mail

It's supposed to make life easier, but e-mail has become a big pain. Enter the wiki, new software that could change the way you communicate.

Email in the Workplace: Employees Perceive Email Differently than Employers

Argues that employees' misunderstanding of email in the workplace has in part stemmed from employers not being direct about the need to monitor it. By being clear and direct, employers can possibly reduce misuse and ultimately the need for such intrusive email monitoring.

Email Overload in the Workplace: A Multi-Dimensional Exploration

This paper is a multidimensional exploration of email overload, incorporating a mixture of studies and opinions presented by various experts.

Incompetent Email Marketing = Lost Future Opportunities

Lack of personalization made an email newsletter completely useless to the recipient, damaging long-term customer relationship efforts.

The New Email Law and You

If you are using email to market your small business, here's what you need to know about the new spam law, the CAN-SPAM Act, which went into effect on January 1st.

Is Your E-Mail Getting Through?

Ever had an e-mail message go missing in cyberspace? With about half the e-mail messages sent daily being spam, it's no wonder that Internet Service Providers are installing spam blocking software. But are your legitimate messages being blocked too? Find out how to avoid triggering spam alerts with your everyday mail.

Useless Memory and Email

While no one would argue that email is useless, continued inefficient management of emails makes email worse than useless—--it makes them dangerous.

Checklist for Effective E-Mail

Use this checklist to ensure that your e-mail reflects a high level of professionalism and increases your credibility within your company.

The History and Future of SMTP: SMTP's Adaptations to a Hostile Internet

SMTP is an abbreviation for 'Simple Mail Transfer Protocol', and is the standard internet protocol for sending email from one system to another. Although the word 'simple' belies the inherent complexity of the protocol, SMTP has proved to be a remarkably robust, useful, and successful standard. The design decisions that made it so useful, though, have given spammers and infectious code an easy way to spread their unwanted messages. Its recent evolution reflects the tug-of-war between those unsavory players and the administrators who want to protect their systems and their users.

Information Architecture: The Key to HTML Email Optimization

Over the years, email has established itself and still remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools to promote new offers, maintain regular dialogue with customers and generate demand for online and offline channels. However, with today’s epidemic of email overflow, email marketers face an instant verdict by the recipients.

Looking Toward the Electronic Future in the Classroom: Using Electronic Mail

In the last decade, electronic mail (email) has continued to gain popularity and use, especially in the business community. Growing email use has transformed business communication, making it necessary for business executives, scientists, and engineers to acquire knowledge and competence in electronic communication. Such changes make it necessary to teach skills for effective email communication in technical and business writing classes. Preparing students to meet unique communication challenges that they will face in today’s business world is valuable.

Hybrid Language: A Study of E-Mail and Miscommunication

Electronic communication is a hybrid of spoken, written and digital communication. Using linguistic theories and ethnographic methods, this paper examines how the unique language composition of email contributes to miscommunication between individuals. Until written language evolves to account for electronic media, careful reading and writing of email, recognition of its hybrid nature, and occasionally bypassing it as a communication channel, can assist in avoiding or correcting miscommunications.

Pay Attention to The Closing Lines of Your Emails

When it comes to writing emails to our customers and prospects, we pay a great deal of attention to the subject lines and the opening lines of the inside text. You also need to pay attention to your closings.

"I Sent You the File as Plain Text!" And Other Lies

Procedures for how to send a file as RTF or plain text in the body of an email.

Managing Email Content—Challenges and Benefits

As more organizations embrace e-mail as their primary method of communication, most overlook the fact that e-mail contains evidence of business decisions, actions and transactions.

E-Mail in the Classroom Workplace

E-mail usage creates special concerns in education, and teachers must learn how to make e-mail a more effective tool. Students must be taught how to use e-mail for purposes other than informal communication and to evaluate sources of information gathered through correspondence. Although e-mail presents problems in how and what students learn, it also can foster international learning experiences, provide some students with a clearer method of expressing their ideas, and increase collaboration.

Spam I Am

Outlaw spam? I think it's best just to ignore it.

A Critical Look at E-mail

E-mail usage is so common and popular now that we hardly think about it. Because of its prevalence, many people have written critically about it, compelling us to look at our own usage.

Are You Drowning in E-Mail?

We can't halt the flow of incoming email messages, but we can give you some suggestions that will help you become a better email communicator.

Time-Consuming Email Communications

Our documentation and advertising bureau mails five emails with attachments on the average per day to different customers, partners and other service organisations. The sizes of the attachments vary roughly from 50 KB up to 2 MB. About 60% of our emails with attachments don't create any problems with the addressee. However, 40% need additional attention. This fraction causes communication problems.

A New Way to Talk: ComputerEase.common

Have you noticed? As the world shrinks, the need for good communication gets bigger. More people talk, chat, argue, negotiate, make love, and make war through electronic communication today than ever before. If you can't communicate electronically with ease, then you'd better learn fast. To rephrase Yogi Bera, 'if you don't know how to talk on the information highway, you'll end up somewhere else.' The purpose of this progression is to foster dynamic roundtable discussion about what it means to communicate well through electronic means such as email.

Unified Communication Systems

Unified messaging and person-to-person communications over heterogeneous networks are relatively new applications. Many commercial messaging systems, such as Onebox.com and Ericsson's Unified Messenger, have already begun their journey in this direction. There is much room for growth, however, and many other systems will soon need the capabilities described above just to stay competitive in the market.

Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength

E-newsletters that are informative, convenient, and timely are often preferred over other media. However, a new study found that only 11% of newsletters were read thoroughly, so layout and content scannability are paramount.

E-Mail Notifications: Making Unsubscription Easy

Unsubscribing email newsletters and other email notification services can be an unpleasant and time-consuming experience. Most unsubscribe problems can be avoided by making the subscribers email visible and linking to an unsubscribe page in all emails.

Reducing Junk E-Mail (Spam)

These tips will help you to avoid receiving junk email. They also give you some guidelines to ensure that you don't help its spread.

CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree

Despite prevailing wisdom to the contrary, you can safely deploy HTML emails styled with good old-fashioned CSS. If you're not content to roll over and use font tags in your HTML emails, read on.

You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online

This book addresses the issues of online writing and particularly writing e-mail, which should concern all us who spend a good chunk of our days in front of a computer screen creating and replying to e-mail messages. The book is structured in three parts: 'The virtual mensch,' 'Alpha mail,' and 'Words of passage.'

Using Email to Promote Usability

One of the most effective and inexpensive tools for educating your market is email. Here's how to use email to keep your visibility high and keep in touch with everyone in your network -- because you never know where the work is going to come from.

How to Write an Email

How do you write an effective email that your recipient finds clear and easy to understand? There's more to it than just typing a few words and clicking the Send button. These notes give you some guidelines on the following: technical issues, document structure, the importance of knowing your audience, language issues and layout and visual design.

The Usability of Email Subject Lines

Email is very important to a lot of people and companies. However, very little usability research has been done on email, specifically email subject lines. This article is a summary of a research report written by WebWord on the topic and contains several results. The basic finding from the research is that effective email subject lines are very short, very meaningful, and personal.

Allowing for Personal Choice -- HTML or Text E-Mail

When you ask readers whether they want your e-mail newsletter in HTML or text e-mail, be sure to honor their preference.

Hyperlinks in Email

Email usability can be dramatically increased or decreased by how URLs are designed and placed in messages. An example of one problem is described in detail in this article. Also, a couple of simple tips are provided to help you improve the URLs in your email messages.

Automated Email From Websites to Customers

Transactional email can be a website's customer service ambassador, but messages must first survive a ruthless selection process in the user's in-box. Differentiating your message from spam is thus the first duty of email design.

Encryption Basics Decrypted

Most people sending e-mail nowadays take no steps to prevent their messages from being intercepted. That's fine for many types of messages, but just as there are written messages that you wouldn't want to put on a postcard and would prefer to have protected by an envelope, there's a need for encryption in electronic communication. Besides, encryption can do more than keep things secret. The concepts on which encryption is based can be difficult, and most of the complication is handled behind the scenes by software. Nevertheless, it's useful to have a general understanding of how encryption works. Encryption software (often part of a Web browser or server, e-mail client, or other program) is built around the use of a special number, called a key, to convert information into a form that can be read only by someone who has the key needed to decrypt it.

E-Mail, Acronyms, and Alphabet Soup

Emoticons have become pretty complex, now including ones like :-# [lips are sealed], :-& [tongue tied], or :-'' [pursing lips].

Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips

The informal e-mails you exchange with your friends don't have to meet any particular standards, but if you want to be taken seriously by professionals, you should learn proper e-mail etiquette.

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

In a conversation, there is some minimum of shared context. You might be in the same physical location, and even on the phone you have, at minimum, commonality of time. When you generate a document for paper, usually there is some context embedded in the medium: the text is in the proceedings of a conference, written on a birthday card, handed to your professor with a batch of Econ 101 term papers, or something similar. With email, you can't assume anything about a sender's location, time, frame of mind, profession, interests, or future value to you. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your receivers some context. This section will give specific strategies for doing so.

The Readers and Writers Behind Electronic Mail

As electronic mail replaces face-to-face communication in many work environments, a thorough analysis of this evolving medium and its impact on communication is necessary. In many workplaces, telephone calls and knocks on doors have dramatically decreased in frequency, but the number of emails that circulate through one’s inbox is continuing to increase. Yet, our understanding of this new medium and how it is being used is limited. Some scholars argue that email has many of the characteristics of speech; some argue that it has the same characteristics as writing, while others argue that it is a completely new genre of communication.

Is It Safe to Email Editors? Spam Filters Are Causing Unexpected Problems

It wasn't so long ago that freelance writers hesitated to email editors because email queries and other communications might not be the right form. Now comes word that as many as one email in four never gets delivered, even email that the intended recipient wants. This startling number comes from 'More e-mail scandal' an article by Brian Livingston on InfoWorld's web site. Granted, most of the comments and research there is aimed at opt-in email, but it's apparent that other, legitimate emails are also going missing. The problem is twofold: spam and spam filters.

E-mail and Tattoos: A Primer on Netiquette

Rogers and Perri discuss the hazards of e-mail and present five tips for using it properly in a professional environment.

E-tiquette: Rules of the Road

Hay-Roe presents nine rules for writing clear, concise e-mail messages.

Rating Electronic Mail Clients: Convenience or Security?

Archee assesses the security of several e-mail clients.

Spam on the 'Net: An Ethical Dilemma

Archee examines the ethical and practical problems associated with receiving and sending unsolicited e-mail.

Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off

Users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters which feel much more personal than websites. In usability testing, success rates were high for subscribe and unsubscribe tasks, but users were frustrated by newsletters that demanded too much of their time.

Protecting the User's Mailbox

Email is a powerful way to reach customers, but overdoing it is risky. Let users know up front that you'll respect their mailboxes. Otherwise, they won't give their email addresses, and you'll lose a unique channel for marketing and customer service.

Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips

This document offers 10 tips to help you write effective professional e-mails. The informal e-mails you exchange with your friends don't have to meet any particular standards, of course, but if you want to be taken seriously by people who use e-mail frequently, you should know e-mail etiquette.

Company E-mail and Internet Policies

More and more companies are monitoring e-mail and Internet use by employees. How do they do it, why do they do it, and is it really legal? This article explores the privacy, harassment and criminal concerns raised by employees' use of the Internet and e-mail. Plus, two forms: E-mail/Internet Usage Policy and Software Policy.

Collaboration via E-mail and Internet Relay Chat: Understanding Time and Technology

The purpose of this preliminary study was to structure and begin to study how collaborators working across distance perceive and use e-mail and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to facilitate their collaborative and decision-making processes. Students from the University of Western Sydney and the University of Minnesota worked in pairs to respond to four decision-making scenarios over a four-week period. Using e-mail, students came to a decision more quickly than when using IRC, and when IRC was slow, students reverted to a series of rapid-fire e-mail messages to facilitate their work. Students appreciated the cross-cultural experience; however, they struggled to create a shared communicative context via the Internet.

Why Your E-Mail May Never Arrive After All

Robert Lucky's view of excuses useful for fending off the e-mail deluge may not all belong to what he termed a 'passing, satirical dream' [IEEE Spectrum, January, p. 162]. As he put it, 'When someone asks, 'Did you see my urgent e-mail?' you can't say no, because it obviously got to you.' I have been trying to point out the error in this ever since I began to understand, more or less, the workings of Internet e-mail. Four years of managing corporate e-mail have shown me that the excuses are indeed plausible and do occur in nature.

Mailing List Usability

E-mail lists are an e-marketers dream: mailing lists provide a highly targeted way of reaching people; email doesn't require you to wait until the customer remembers to go visit your site. Mailing lists allow you to extend the footprint of your website. In the literal sense (get space in the user's inbox and not just in the browser). And in the more interesting metaphorical sense: More services become possible when you can reach out to users and provide them with time-dependent information. Just remember the push fiasco: it is not the goal to lay claim to ever-increasing amounts of the users time; prompt them just enough to be useful but not so much that the email becomes a burden. Users will unsubscribe faster than you can say 'information overload.'