Cyber-Sierra Workshop 2002: E-Mail Power
     

E-Mail Management:

|  Start |  Do's |  Don'ts |  Manage |  Outreach |  Spam | 

 

E-Mail Management

E-mail piles up. If you don't organize it when it arrives, you will soon be swamped. Be sure to check your office guidelines for rules regarding E-mail before deleting transmissions.

E-mail can become a burden if unmanaged.
  • Read, Respond, Organize or Delete
    Discipline yourself to manage e-mail at once. Read it. Respond or forward if necessary. File it in a named correspondence folder or delete it if your office guidelines permit it.
     
  • Forward appropriate e-mail.
    Forward messages to those who should be kept on the "same page". However, use judgement here. Sometimes identifying headers or personal information on e-mail correspondence should be stripped before an item is forwarded. Do not forward confidential information. When in doubt, don't forward.
     
  • Delete suspicious or virused e-mail.
    First check with your office technical person. If there is none, delete all e-mail suspected as being a virus carrier and empty the e-mail waste bin. Do not bother responding. The person named in the header is probably a victim, too.
     
  • Read e-mail offline.
    As a precaution against spyware gifs or javascripts which may be contained in html messages, read your mail offline. Spyware gifs are tiny images, often transparent, that can be included in an html page to verify that a message has been opened at an active email address. If you are online when you read your mail, the html page requests a gif file from a third party web site and the fetching of that invisible image tells the spammer that you have read the message. Spammers use these tools to authenticate addresses.
     
  • Add names to your address book and organize your addresses into groups or lists.
    Start thinking about e-mail as an outreach tool. Gather names of people with whom you correspond into lists for future contact when you start your first e-mail newsletter.
     

Reference Sites

  • One Northwest: Email
    One Northwest has some great articles on managing your mail with Eudora, Netscape and Outlook.
     
  • Mail2Web.Com
    Something blocking your mailbox? See what it is by going to Mail2web and using their secure email reader. You can delete unwanted mail here, before downloading, see file sizes and more. Tip: don't open suspect attachments with any online viewer, because opening is opening.
     
|  Start |  Do's |  Don'ts |  Manage |  Outreach |  Spam | 

 

 

WORKSHOPS: |  E-Mail and Outreach |  Web 101 |  Building Accessible Webs |  Web Security | 

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