Module 2 - Email Tasks

1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?

An email message can immediately give you information on the sender in a variety of ways:

Username
Quickly allows you to recognise the sender if they are using their real name or a familiar nickname. In the work environment we often use a full name or a slightly abbreviated version so it’s pretty clear who is contacting you.

Personal usernames can be a bit different though, random nicknames are used and they can also be changed/new addresses started. As an example, I knew an angry young teenage boy, Peter, whose first email username was PeterDevil666 (or something like that) who later found religion and became PeterVerse22 (or some kind of biblical reference). Who would ever have thought that was the same person?

Domain Name
In the business world this is a great way of immediately identifying which company someone is working, this really helps to decide the speed with which you need to respond.

In personal use, it can show someone’s interests, eg I know a lot of environmentalists who use ‘wildmail’ over the commercial yahoo or hotmail options.

Small businesses and home web users might also have their own email server enabling them to personalise their domain name. Gives the impression that you really know your technical stuff!

Subject
Quick identification of the relevance and importance of your email. Particularly helpful if you are seeking a penis enlargement or get rich quick scheme.

Path…
I’m a bit stuck on this one. I’ve been searching through my hotmail inbox to see if I can find information on the route the email has taken but I can’t see any options. I’ll try my work email tomorrow where I use Outlook, I hope there will be more information there.


2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all’ functions of email?

CC
I use this function quite often at work when I reply to a message on my boss’ behalf (I have full control of her inbox). When I cc her into the response it comes in to the top of her inbox, she can read the thread of emails that led to my response and the commitments I have made on her behalf J. I can then delete the preceding messages relating to it, reducing the traffic in her inbox.

BCC
The only time I would use this would be if I was making an announcement to a group of people, who I wanted to remain anonymous from each other. I’d put all the names into the BCC box which stops the email addresses being shown to each other. I don’t really like this feature, it’s seems secretive and sly to me and it makes my skin crawl.

Reply All
I would mostly use this when organising a lunch or dinner with work folks, when a group decision is required for the restaurant or bar. Not very professional use of business email – but it makes things easier when we are spread across 4 or 5 offices! Other than that, I rarely need to respond to more than one person.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?

Ahh.. very relevant question in my job just now. Our bank has just gobbled up another bank (apologies, the technical term is that we are in ‘integration’), and the new bank uses a different email system to us – we use Outlook. As a result we have had a lot of trouble synchronising information such as meeting requests – our meeting requests won’t update in their diaries, their responses come back to us as an attachment that our email system can’t read. It’s not working very well so far. We have been overcoming this by following up every action with a simple text only email.

Specifically regarding attachments, I am mostly converting documents to pdf files, which seem to be the lightest attachment weight, and easy for any one to open.

Saving word documents or text only files in rtf format is an excellent way to ensure the receiver will be able to read the information.

4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?

I help organise large events at work. When I send out an invitation or request for information to the attendees, I set up filters on my inbox so that all the responses will go into a separate file for action at a later date. I love this function, as sometimes I have literally thousands of responses coming back in a short period.

5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?

At work I have structured my folders in subjects – well subjects that make sense to me anyway, not sure if anyone else could find them! I then use sub folders to further organise. For example I have a top level folder called travel, then I create subfolders for each trip/tour taken by my boss and I put all information related to those trips in there.I also use folders for processing work. I record particular authorisations for our division. I plonk all the new requests in one folder and when I’ve dealt with them they go in the archive/dealt with folder. This way I know exactly where I’m at with my workload.