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Common Questions
Varied Collections
Style and/or Netiquette
Geeky Technical Details
(E-)Mailing Lists
Sociology
Security
Spam
Policies
History
Management
Software
Scholarly Work
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[Introduction] [What
Makes Email Different?] [Context]
[Format] [Page
Layout] [Intonation]
[Gestures] [Status]
[Formality] [Greetings
and Signatures] [Summary]
[Appendix A: Acronyms and Jargon]
[Appendix B: Domain Names]
[Appendix C: Bibliography]
Email Bibliography
Kaitlin Duck
Sherwood
Here are just a few resources that you can use to learn more about
email. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and will always be
under construction as new material appears.
Common Questions
Here is more information on some common questions:
Varied Collections
- Mary Houten-Kemp's site, Everything
E-Mail, lives up to its name.
- Heinz Tschabitscher runs About.com's
email site, and does so very well. His site has quite a lot
of very good, well-organized information on it.
- Yahoo's
Electronic Mail Category covers everything and the kitchen
sink. Google's
Email Help and Tutorials site is a bit more focused.
- There is an extensive guide to different programs for reading
email at Inter-Links.
This site also has information on how to find email addresses.
- Jacobe
Palme has a
small review of email books.
- The Internet Business Forum
has a very professional set of Email
Tips and Techniques.
- Wingra has a nice list
of links. It covers mostly techie-type things - protocols,
standards - but there is a pretty comprehensive list of industry
magazines as well.
- There are a bunch of catch-all books that have a chapter or
two on style/etiquette issues, but which tend to talk a lot about
what email is, why it is wonderful, what features it has, and
how to push the right buttons and pull down the right menus, using
one or more of the emailers of the time to illustrate the concepts.
These include:
- E-Mail
for Dummies by John R. Levine (and a bunch of others)
covers a whole collection of email software and services.
IDG, 1997; ISBN: 0764501313; 300 pages
- Using Email Effectively by Linda Lamb using the
Unix mailx email reader in the examples.
O'Reilly and Associates, 1995; ASIN: 1565921038
- Using
E-Mail, by Dave Gibbons and four others, covering
a whole bunch of email programs.
Que, 1994; ISBN: 0-7897-0023-9
- The
E-Mail Companion: Communicating Effectively via the Internet
and Other Global Networks by John Quarterman and Smoot
Carl-Mitchell, using the Unix pine email reader.
Addison-Wesley, 1994; ISBN: 0201406586
- There are also some interesting articles and books about
the differences between oral and literate societies. I've
got those in a separate bibliography.
Style and/or Netiquette
I lump style and netiquette together here because many authors don't
distinguish between the two.
- I Will Follow...
covers a lot of the same material that my
guide covers, but not in as much detail.
- Paul McFedries has an email
primer that is quite nice.
- Albion.com has the Netiquette
Home Page, which has excerpts from the book
Netiquette by Virginia Shea. The book is very thorough
on how to be a nicer person, and tends to have a Usenet-oriented
focus.
Albion Books, 1994; ISBN: 0963702513
- Tips
on E-mail Netiquette
- Harvard Business School Publishing The
Ten Commandments of E-Mail
- Electronic
Mail Etiquette (David Harris)
- Avoiding the
Dark Side of Email by Jim
Britell is a thoughtful essay on the dangers of miscommunication
in email and how to properly convey your message.
- Roadmap
by Rev. Bob Crispen talks about how to avoid flame wars.
- E-Mail Etiquette,
With Some Rules to Extinguish Flame-Throwing by Larry
Magid has good, solid advice and a list of links to even more
advice.
- I disagree vehemently with some of the advice at Business
Netiquette International. If you don't like my
guidelines, you might like his.
- The book Elements
of E-mail Style by David Angell and Brent Heslop is an
excellent book with a slightly different purpose from my guide.
They talk about style a little bit, but most of the pages cover
what I think of as "language mechanics" - spelling, sentence structure,
punctuation, and so on.
Addison-Wesley Pub Co, 1994; ISBN: 0201627094; 157 pages
- E-Writing:
21st Century Tools for Effective Communication by Dianna Booher
is similar to Elements
of E-mail Style, but bigger and thicker. 314 of its 370
pages are devoted to writing -- on paper or in email.
Pocket Books, 2001; ISBN: 0743412583; 368 pages
- There is a classic, tongue-in-cheek guide of what not to do
at Dear Emily
Postnews.
-
Writing Effective E-Mail by Nancy Flynn and Tom Flynn
is really kind of a workbook. It looks like it is good for use
with a live training class. I don't agree with some of their statements
about how important grammar is nor that email is no different
than letters. They do cover all the basics briefly but pretty
well.
Crisp Publications, 1998; ISBN: 1-56052-515-0; 82 pages
- If you read A Beginner's Guide to
Effective Email, you'll be bored by
E-Mail Essentials by Robert S. Want, as about half of
it is A Beginner's Guide
to Effective Email. (I put the Beginner's Guide into the
public domain, so yes, he can do that.)
-
Better, Faster Email: Getting the Most Out of Email
by Joan Tunstall is a grab-bag of all kinds of e-mail topics,
including when to use email vs. phone, security, and finding mailing
lists, and maintaining your address book.
Allen & Unwin; April 1999; ISBN 1864488999; 192 pages
Easy Email, also by Joan Tunstall, is basically a
very small, abridged version of Better, Faster Email.
Allen & Unwin; 2000; ISBN 1865082945; 192 pages
- Collections of emoticons can be found at:
There are also two books on emoticons:
Smileys by Dougherty Sanderson and David W. Sanderson
O'Reilly & Associates, 1993; ISBN: 1565920414; 93 pages
and
The Smiley Dictrionary by Seth Godin
Peachpit, 1993; ISBN: 1-56609-008-3; 73 pages
-
Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age
talks about issues that The Chicago Manual of Style doesn't
cover yet: things like how to cite a web page, how to spell email,
etc. Somebody had to write a spec for the language, and I guess
they were as good an outfit as any to write it. Be aware that
they talk how to translate net concepts to paper, not how to translate
paper concepts to electronic media. Furthermore, most of
the book is a huge glossary.
HardWired, 1997; ISBN: 1888869011; 158 pages
-
Why Didn't You Say That in the First Place? : How to Be Understood
at Work by Richard Heyman. I haven't read this one yet,
but it looks like a good book on paper document style issues.
Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997; ISBN: 0787903442 ; 192 pages
Geeky Technical Details
- If you want information about the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts
of exactly how the bits in your email message end up on someone
else's screen, Carnegie-Mellon's Project
Cyrus has a very good
overview of email standards.
- The specifications for almost all of the Internet are called
RFCs. I made a search page that uses Google
to search all of the site that has RFCs and RFC drafts.
- Want to know the difference between IMAP and POP? Look at Terry
Gray's Message
Access Paradigms and Protocols.
- Delivering Electronic Mail by Phillip Robinson is mostly
geared to system administrators and other technojocks. (Out of
print)
M&T Books, 1992; ISBN: 1558511709
-
Effective E-Mail : Clearly Explained : File Transfer, Security,
and Interoperability by Brad Shimmin (with CD-ROM) is
kind of "geek lite". It is somewhat technical, with a particular
emphasis on how to cope with different file formats and attachments.
There is also a nice section on security and how to send email
to/through proprietary (non-Internet) systems. It uses Eudora
for its examples.
Ap Professional, 1997; ISBN: 0126400601 ; 250 pages
Mailing LIsts
Sociology
Security
Spam
- Spamcon.org has a lot of
resources to combat spamming and to deal with spam.
-
Stopping Spam by Alan Schwartz and Simson Garfinkel is
a book mostly for system administrator-types on how to cut down
on unsolicited commercial email. There is some stuff for casual
computer users as well.
O'Reilly & Associates, 1998; ISBN: 1-56592-388-X; 204 pages
-
Removing the Spam : Email Processing and Filtering by
Geoff Mulligan is a guide for system administrators or Unix power
users. It tells how to use sendmail and procmail
to get rid of spam. (I have not read this book yet.)
Addison-Wesley Longman, 1999; ISBN: 0201379570; 190 pages
I have heard of but not yet gotten a chance to review:
- E-Mail by Stephen A. Caswell.
Artech House, 1988; ISBN: 0890063036
-
Internet Messaging by David Strom, Marshall T. Rose.
Harcourt Brace, 1998; ISBN: 0139786104 ; 400 pages
Policy
I am occasionally asked for guidelines in creating usage policies.
I don't make policies, but here is what I've run accross:
Scholarly Work
Occasionally people ask me for more scholarly/academic work. I don't
follow the literature closely, so you may have better luck looking
for "Computer-Mediated Communication" or "Human Computer Interaction"
in your favorite search engine.
Here is what I know about:
- Jacek Gwizdka has an
extensive bibliography
of email research. Go here first!
- Dr. Carsten Sørensen has a
bibliography of Information Overload resources.
- I bought two copies of the book
Connections : New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization
by Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler because I found it so fascinating.
They talk about how electronic communications alter the way people
work.
MIT Press, 1992; ISBN: 0262691582; 212 pages Reprint edition
- Eric Williams has written a scholarly paper on Predicting
E-Mail Effects in Organizations.
- Long and Short Routes to Success in Electronically-Mediated
Negotiations: Group Affiliations and Good Vibrations by Don
Moore, Terri Kurtzberg, Leigh Thompson, and Michael Morris is
a very interesting research paper that finds that email negotiations
between strangers are more profitable for both sides if the parties
have some personal communication before starting negotiations.
Research Paper #1484, Graduate School of Business, Stanford
University.
- John December hosts an index of Computer
Mediated Communication.
- Ronald
Rice of Rutgers has a long list of scholarly papers that he's
been involved with; many of them have to do with computer-mediated
communication.
- Email
Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email
by Steve Whittaker
and Candace Sidner
is an excellent study of how people really use email. (Note: "overload"
here is used in the techy sense of "overloaded operators", not
in the sense of "overwhelmed".)
- Olle
Bälter did extensive observations of real-world email
use for his
thesis. He makes recommendations for how to improve email
use. Bälter also did a sophisticated
mathematical model of email use times based on keystroke-level
analysis. Two interesting points from his research: having
over thirty folders is a bad idea; so is periodically cleaning
out old messages.
- E-mail
as Habitat by Nicolas Ducheneaut and Victoria Bellotti
is a field study of how people at three different companies actually
use email.
Interactions of the ACM, September/October 2001
- Bälter and Sidner wrote a paper together on Bifrost,
a tool for organizing email messages by category.
- Heylighen and Dewaele's paper
on formality seems to support my thoughts on context
and formality. Their view
of formality is slightly different from mine: their research
suggests that language is more formal the less shared context
the speaker and audience have. (Note: I'm still rolling their
ideas around in my head; I may rewrite pieces of my email guide.)
- Horvitz, Jacobs, and Hovel
report on their Baysean network for prioritizing incoming messages.
- David Kirsch's
A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload talks about the various
forms of information overload and various coping strategies.
Unknown
I don't know what these books are about yet.
- Simple Steps to E-Mail Success by Joy Van Skiver. Wrexpress;
1998; ISBN: 0964382423
History of Email
While electronic mail within one computer system has been around longer,
Ray Tomlinson gets the credit for sending the first electronic mail
message from one computer to another.
I want to make a brief mention of the
PLATO project, which I grew up using. By 1974, PLATO had e-mail,
newsgroups, chat, and instant messaging, followed soon afterward by
remote viewing of someone else's screen. I'm not exactly sure what
the user base was, but I know that it could handle about 200 simultaneous
users back then. I would guess that there were a few thousand regular
users, maybe more.
Email Management Software
There are a bunch of companies developing software to help manage
incoming email. I don't believe this is an exhaustive list, but it
will get you started:
These integrate email with more traditional call center software:
Go back to A Beginner's Guide to Effective
Email
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