Using Email Effectively

By Linda Lamb, Jerry Peek
January 1900
Pages: 160
ISBN 10: 1-56592-103-8 | ISBN 13: 9781565921030

This book is OUT OF PRINT.

Book description

After using email for a few years, you learn from your own mistakes and from reading other people's mail. You learn how to include a message but leave in only the sections that make your point, how to recognize if a network address "looks right," how to successfully subscribe and unsubcribe to a mailing list, how to save mail so that you can find it again. This book shortens the learning-from-experience curve for all mailers, so you can quickly be productive and send email that looks intelligent to others.
Full Description

When you're new to email, you're usually shown what keystrokes to use to read and send a message. You might be told about a good online help system or given some documentation that tells you about command options. That instruction is necessary and helpful, especially if you haven't had much computer experience. But knowing the keystrokes isn't sufficient to become an effective and productive communicator. You also need to understand the context of email. In a typical business environment, it might take months or years -- and many mistakes -- to learn:

How to organize saved mail so that you can find it again
When to include a previous message, and how much to include, so that your reader can quickly make sense of what's being discussed
When a network address "looks right," so that more of your messages get through the first time
When a 'bounced' message will never be delivered and when the bounce merely indicates temporary network difficulties
How to successfully subscribe and unsubscribe to a mailing list
How to modify your email style depending on the expectations of your recipients

With first-person anecdotes, examples, and general observations, Using Email Effectively shortens the learning-from-experience curve for all mailers, so that you can quickly be productive and send email that looks intelligent to others. The book starts with an overview of help systems and basic commands for many mailers, and then looks at the context for understanding productivity, saved mail, network addressing, communication, mailing lists, and sending files.

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Book details

First Edition: January 1900
ISBN: 1-56592-103-8
Pages: 160

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"The best thing about Using Email Effectively is how short it is: my experience is that the chance of most manuals, documentation or guides -- particularly those aimed at beginners -- being read is inversely proportional to their length. Another feature that makes Using Email Effectively accessible is the use of side-bars and short quotes to break up the text into more manageable portions. Despite its brevity, it does manage to cover all the important facets of using electronic mail, and I will definitely be purchasing a copy for my department and encouraging my users to read it: it will not only save me time spent answering queries about bounce messages and how to transmit files via mail, but will also ease my conscience about not doing as much as I might have done to educate them about email netiquette and mailing lists. Other topics covered include email style, the organisation of saved mail and the use of signatures. "Using Email Effectively also contains some mailer-specific material of a technical kind (there are examples from pine, mush, elm, eudora, cc:mail, zmail, mail, xmh, and mh). This could be a bit confusing for the novice, but most of it is in side-columns or separate digressions, and the authors always make it clear when they are talking about something applicable only to Unix systems or particular mailers. This material will help to give the reader some idea of the variety of mailers in use, something people who have only ever had experience of a single mail program often have trouble grasping." - Disclaimer: I requested and received a review copy of Using Email Effectively from O'Reilly & Associates but I have no stake, financial or otherwise, in its success. - Copyright (C) Danny Yee 1995 URL http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/danny/book-reviews/index.html

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