EMAIL BASICS

TO

Use TO for the people who you are writing to. Email addresses can be entered like this : username@domain.co.nz    or like: Realname <username@domain.co.nz> 
( .co.nz  stands for company,  .org.nz  stands for organisation,  .govt.nz  stands for government,  .ac.nz  stands for academic and so on. However   .com  and  .org  are like  .co.nz  and  .org.nz  but global, or more likely American.)

The email address must have no spaces. Use a comma to seperate more than one address.
Watch out for typos!  If you have an 'address book' youll only have to type the address once. Also hitting 'reply' or 'copy and paste' ing an address from another email or webpage are other ways to get the spelling exactly right. Dont worry if you do get it wrong, most likely some computer will reject it and send it right back to you.
 

One other thing: you know how, just before you pop a letter into a postbox, you recheck that it has a stamp, and that is addressed to the right person. Doing the same with email is even more important. Double checking the list of recipients will make sure that the right people and only the right people get it!  Many many emails have been sent to people by mistake.

Lastly while email is extremely reliable, don't assume that any email actually reaches someone. If the email is really important follow up to make sure they received it.

CC

Use CC (carbon copy) for those people who may also be affected by your message in some way, but beware sending out lots of TOs or CCs to people who dont know each other. Just because it is so easy to do, doesnt mean that people arent sensitive about where their email addreses go to. For this situation use BCC (blind copy). (With BCC you need at least one TO, and this can be yourself).

Subject

Provide a clear, short and to the point subject line. Think of three main keywords as a rule. eg: Coffee next week?

Good subject lines also make the email easy to find later. Also some people get HUGE amounts of email, often hundreds a day... true! This means that they dont always get to read everything. By spending a minute to make a good subject line you'll get read.

Body

Well we leave this up to you! but heres a few tips. People dont like to read much text on computers, so keep it SHORT. Almost everything can be said using three paragraphs of three sentences each.
Always use two carriage returns between paragraphs, you'll see why later. Use capitals in very small doses for emphasis only... large amounts are seen as shouting. Because emails are so quick and easy, perfect spelling is not all that important. However people being people we have this weird tendency to miss whole words out (maybe because our brains go faster than our fingers?).
PROOF READ!

As writing doesnt convey our tone of voice or body language we can often be misunderstood. Sarcasim, especially, often fails. Err on the side of politeness, 'smilies' can help-- like this one :-). Its a familiy show...remember that what you say may be recorded for all time. Never send anything that you would'nt mind seeing on the front page of the the NZ Herald. Ok, it doesnt happen very often, but it does happen!

Sometimes its a good idea to Include some of a previous email so that people know what you are replying to. Only include the bare minimum though, not copys of the last 6 emails between you!
Do NOT forward virus warnings, petitions, chain letters or 'pyramid' type send-this-to-everybody-you-know type items. All these do is cause internet traffic jams. Do NOT forward virus warnings, petitions, chain letters or 'pyramid' type send-this-to-everybody-you-know type items. Did we say that twice?

Finish the email with your full name and contact details. Additionally your home town, and 1-2 links to your organisations help give strangers an idea of who they are talking to. Click 'send' and you are done.

Attachments

'Attachments' are files like word processor documents that can be bundled along with an email. SImply put they are encoded for e-travel and clipped onto the email. Handle attachments with care.

Adding an attachment is relatively simple, usually there will be a attachment or 'paperclip' button to click, which asks you to locate the particular file you want to send. Attachments can make an email rather bigger than normal, and may take a couple of minutes to send instead of a couple of seconds. Check before you send it what the file size is: your friends will start to squark for anything much over 200K. Over 2M (K = thousands of characters, M = millions of chars) , hey, go and burn a CD and snail mail it. There should be little need to send files that big as athe text of a full length book can be under 500K.

Attachments can contain viruses (virii?). So dont just open any old attachment that people send you, without considering the 3 basic questions (see virus page).