How to use Internet mail

Electronic mail, or Email, is one of the most important Internet services. Until the advent of the World-Wide Web, it was also the most popular. It's also the most personal mainstream service: your Email reflects your own personality, so it's important to convey the correct impression in your electronic mail.

For many people, electronic mail is still a novel experience. Many people sign up for an email account, get some mail program like Eudora or one of the Microsoft mail programs, play around for a while, and then just about forget it, leaving mail to collect unanswered. Even big companies are offenders here.

In those cases where such people do send or answer mail, the quality of the message is frequently poor. They often contain misspellings, irrelevant quotes, or poor layout (formatting).

Don't underestimate the effect of such a mail message. Your mail message is all people see of you, and if it's poorly formatted, one line per paragraph, badly spelt, or full of errors, it will give people a poor impression of you. Email use is just now becoming mainstream, but many hackers have been using it for 15 years or more.

In the impersonal world of the Internet, your mail messages are the most tangible thing about you. Send out a well thought out, clear and legible message, and you will leave a good impression. Send out a badly formulated, badly formatted and badly spelt message, and you will leave a bad impression.

So what's good formatting and what's bad formatting? That's partially a matter of opinion (and self-expression), of course, but there are a number of Internet Standards which define what a message should look like. Unfortunately, Microsoft is trying to impose its own ``standard'' on the world. I can't give a link to it, because they haven't published their ``standard''.

In the following document, I will use text-mode UNIX mail readers to illustrate the problems. You may not find them as pretty as Microsoft mailers, and all the whiz-bang icons are missing. This is my personal choice: I use mail readers to read and send mail, and not for web browsing or writing documents. This discussion doesn't relate only to Problems in mail fall into a number of categories. Select the link for more details of each category:

• Format problems. The message is barely legible. Microsoft Outlook seems to have taken this problem to new heights.
• Character set problems. Traditionally, Mail was written in US-ASCII, a character set which only suffices to represent English correctly. Even most of the optional English letters, such as æ and French accents é, è and friends are missing.
• Message format problems. The original Internet message formats were defined years ago, and they're relatively simple. Since then, a number of more complicated message formats have been defined.
• Message layout issues. These are entirely in your hands, and they reflect most on your personality. Use them well and you'll make a good impression. Use them badly and you'll make a bad impression. Who decides what good and bad are? The reader does.

• Unless there's a very good reason, avoid proprietary formats. Most mailers can handle them nowadays, but some can't. For example, some people set up Microsoft mailers to use HTML as the standard format. Most other mailers have difficulty with HTML (mutt can display it, however, with the help of Netscape). Other Microsoft mailers send out mail in Microsoft Word format, which is illegible to just about anybody without a Microsoft system.

• When sending ``conventional'' mail, ensure that you adhere to the standards. Again, Microsoft mailers are often bad in this respect: without telling you, they either transform paragraphs into one long line, or they break lines into two, one long and one short. The resulting appearance of the message looks like (taking this paragraph as an example). The display shows the elm mail reader.

  

  Alternate long and short lines:

  

  The insidious thing about these conversions is that you may not be aware of them. If you get messages from other people which appear to be garbled, your mailer may be reformatting them on arrival, in which case it is possibly reformatting them before transmission.

  So why do the mailers create texts like this? Obviously it's a bug that can be fixed--if the vendors consider it a bug. In fact, many of them consider it a feature:

  • They may expect the receiving mail system to do the formatting to match the dimensions of the display screen, so they send the message in one line to make it easier. This is similar to how a web browser displays HTML text.

  • They may make assumptions about the width of the receiving display screen, and truncate any lines that are longer than this width. This gives rise to the second effect.

  On the face of it, this doesn't seem so unreasonable. Who's to say that they're wrong and we (the UNIX people) are right? The answer is: the Internet RFCs. Mailers should not modify plain text messages. In addition, many Mail Transfer Agents (the part of the mail system that sends mail from one system to another) will refuse lines longer than 999 characters, which are easy to reach with moderately long paragraphs.

• Make sure you use an appropriate line length. Many people still use 80 character terminals, so if your lines are more than 80 characters, they will show up as one of the previous examples of bad formatting, even if there's nothing really wrong with your formatting. It's a good idea to limit your line length to about 75 characters even for people with wider terminals: it's difficult to read lines that are much longer. Editors like Emacs can reformat paragraphs for you.

• When replying, ensure that you use a quote convention: include the relevant parts of the text in your message and place a flag character (usually > and a space in front of every line of the quoted text) to distinguish it from what you write. Most UNIX mailers do this for you. Place your reply text directly below the part of the text to which you are replying. Leave an empty line between the original text and your reply, and don't forget the space after the > quote character. Both make the message more legible. For example, compare these two fragments. First, a less legible reply:

  

  Next, a more legible reply:

  

  These examples were made with the mutt mail reader, which also highlights the quoted text.

• Messages tend to grow as more and more replies get added. If large parts of the original text are irrelevant, remove them from the reply.

• What about salutations? You'll see a lot of messages out there which don't start with ``Dear Fred'', and either aren't even signed or just have the name of the author. This looks rather rude at first, but it has become pretty much a standard on the net. It's on the cards that this will change in the course of time, but at the moment it's the way things are, and you shouldn't assume any implicit rudeness on the part of people who write in this manner.

• At the other end of the scale, some people add a standard signature block to each message. You can do this automatically by storing the text in a file called ~/.signature. If you do this, consider that it appears in every message you write, and that it can get on people's nerves if it's too long or too scurrile.

• Make sure that your user ID states who you are--your real name. It doesn't make a very good impression to see mail from foobar (The greatest guru on Earth), especially if he happens to make an incorrect statement. There are better ways to express your individuality.

• Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DON'T SHOUT!!!!!. It's really painful to try to read a message written full of typos or without any line breaks.

A lot of badly formatted messages come from bad mailers or badly configured mailers. The following mailers are known to send out badly formatted messages without you finding out about them:

cc:Mail
Eudora
exmh
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Internet Mail
Microsoft Outlook
Netscape

As you can see, the mailers in the Microsoft world are frequent offenders. If at all possible, use a UNIX mailer. If you must use a mailer under Microsoft environments, make sure it is set up correctly. Try not to send MIME messages unless it's really necessary: a lot of people use mailers which don't get on very well with MIME.