Ever since e-mails have taken over us, the world has finally become a small place. Any body can contact any one at any point of time, if he has a valid e-mail account, and of course a computer with a internet connection. With the passage of time, and new software the e-mail have become flashy, jazzy and what not. In midst of this, with chatting also coming up of age, the chatting terminologies and ways have now being added in emails as well. We should use emails effectively to our purpose, and I have tried to suggest some ideas on using the email effectively.
1.CHOOSE
Choose a email service of your choice like hotmail, usa.net, rediffmail etc. U can also have multiple email accounts at different services...but remember, more number of accounts, more unmanageable it gets to handle the mail. A nice suggestion is to have just two or three services. Another suggestion I would give is to have the SAME username and password for all the email services. This saves the trouble of remembering passwords. I also suggest that one should always try to take up a user-id which has his/her complete name like firstnamelastname@hotmail.com. This greatly helps. One, any one receiving your mail, knows instantly its u! and secondly, if u want to conduct business, or write to elders or do some corporate stuff, then having such a user-id greatly helps. Please avoid choosing absurd names such as gr82p@rediffmail.com, and the likes!
2.AVOID CHATTING TERMINOLOGIES
When you do compose the email, try to avoid short cuts and chatting terminologies as much as possible. Remember friends, you may be an expert at those terminologies, but it might not be the same with the person receiving it. If u are mailing any elders, or conducting business, then do avoid it at any cost. Terms like plz, re, wat, neone look jazzy, but somehow, it seems as if the other person typed out of hurry!. What could result also of this, is in near future, any mis-spelt word in email might be taken for a shortcut word, and before long, oxford might decide to change its dictionary!!!. Lets save our English guys!
3.DON’T BLINDLY REPLY
This is a common problem. I would rather say, that majority of people tend to use the REPLY button to mail back. Fine! But atleast make sure that you have deleted the former content. Believe me, not many people actually do this…when all it takes is a CNTRL+A and then DEL key. The whole exercise will not take 3 seconds. Also, please atleast change the subject line from Re: hi to hi! The advantage of doing this is, the receiver will get a neater mail. Even you will be able to write a neat mail and make it impressive! Moreover, you are also saving on the precious KiloBytes of the mail by making it smaller.
4.SEND MAIL IN TEXT AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
Yeah, I mean it. One should try to send mails in TEXT format as much as possible. Fancy softwares like OUTLOOK 2000 offer a person to actually have a HTML background with so many wall papers and jazzy handwriting. It might look good to the person sending it, but remember, the receiver is going to take a hell of time downloading it, especially on a slow internet connection! I sent a mail from my outlook account to rediffmail account using HTML…and a single line of message ended up in being a message of 50K! whats more, u are not sure of the mail reaching in HTML format only. Sometimes, it does happen that the whole message might look like a HTML code in itself. So friends, avoid using HTML as much as possible. Also, nowadays, e-cards have become quite famous. Use them only if u feel it is absolutely necessary.
5.UTILIZE THE MAIL PROVIDER SERVICES
Major email providers give many services. Rediffmail offers one to use the vacation reply facility whenever u go on a vacation and not able to reply your mails. This is a nice feature, and people should use it. Netaddress or Usa.net offer very good management techniques. U can create separate folders for different purposes like friends, business etc. u can then configure usa.net to drop all your friends mail in friends folder and so on. This greatly helps in sorting out mail, and moreover u can choose the priority of what u want to see first. Hotmail too lets u create folders, but I am not sure, whether it does provide the direct delivery system or not. Of course, Hotmail, has now become too congested in itself, trying to rope in as many facilities as possible. Outlook 2000 also offers many options too, and with their latest software dashboard u can now have browser in your email client!
6.DON’T COMMIT DUMB MISTAKES!
This happens all the times. One should be careful of forwarding mails and other stuff. Always try to use BCC field instead of CC field coz, one, you are openly displaying all the email ids to all the people u sent the mail to and secondly, the size of the mail again bloats. Use ‘BCC’ field whenever u forward a interesting thing, or jokes to many people. Also DON’T EVER EVER forward the SAME mail back to the sender!!!! That would really be the height of net-dumbness! Also take special joy in breaking chain letters which claim to bring u good luck and pot fulls of money and what not. U can be honest, how many of you have actually got something?! So break the chains, and don’t trouble others by sending such mails to your friends. Forward interesting pieces of information to others.
7.AVOID JUNK
Many a times, you start getting emails out of nowhere, informing u about the offers and what nots. More often than not, they end up being a nuisance to the user. A safe way would be to use the junk mail option in hotmail so that u don’t have to see them at all...or block the senders option, thereby avoiding them totally. Blocking the senders also has a advantage of retaining the membership of the site it comes from, as well as avoid the part of seeing those mails!
8.A NOTE ON ATTACHMENTS
attachments are probably a very delicate thing. So care should be taken while opening those attachments. Try to be careful with .exe and .doc extensions, as these may have the highest number of virus which could then take a tall on your system. Outlook express fails here miserably and wears the crown for carrying forward maximum email virus! A best way of avoiding this is not to make any contact list in Outlook express…you will atleast save others from getting infected. Try to scan your attachments before opening them. Never open mails from a untrusted source or u don’t have the faintest idea where it came from. Such mails are better off deleted.
And above all, don’t forget friends to regularly delete all those mails which u no longer require or have done away with. With these 8 points above I am quite sure that one might be able to use email more effectively than before! If there are any more suggestions and you think that others should know, then you can always comment my review or mail me!
Happy mailing!