Foreword
Unfortunately, the time is probably over when newbies can learn netiquette by imitating experienced netizens. The percentage of the cyber-(semi-)illiterate has already become so high that they have less and less opportunities to even observe the cyber-literate. The following are some of the most important time-honored practices that constitute email netiquette. (Especially if you are a student of mine, please help prevent my blood pressure from rising by following them in your email messages to me.)
Email Address Book
- Write someone's email address in your address book using only ASCII characters.
- You don't need to add titles such as Prof. and Dr. to names in your address book.
- Degree of annoyance: 2/5
Subject
- Write a clear and concise subject that summarizes the content of your message.
- Don't leave the subject line blank.
- Don't write your name on the subject line; e.g., Subject: This message is from Blah-Blah-Blah [comment: I know from the header that it's from you].
- Don't write on the subject line what should be part of the message body; e.g., Subject: I want to thank you for your answer to my question [comment: question about what?!].
- Don't change the subject in your reply to someone's message as long as you are writing about the same topic; e.g., a reply to a message with "Subject: netiquette" must be "Subject: Re: netiqutte", not "Subject: Thank you" or something like that.
- Degree of annoyance: 5/5
Encodings
- Remember that certain webmail services have no option of specifying encodings, often causing messages that contain non-ASCII characters look gibberish when they reach your recipients.
- Degree of annoyance: 3/5
Formats
- Send your message in plain text format by turning off HTML in your mailer for security and other reasons.
- HTML mail is probably the most hated practice by experienced netizens and the surest sign of cyber-illiteracy.
- HTML mail is bloated, hence inefficient in that the same message is sent in both plain text and HTML formats.
- Degree of annoyance: 5/5
Message Body
- Set the number of characters on a single line between 70 and 80.
- Don't manually break lines within a paragraph; mailers can do this for you automatically.
- Don't indent the beginning of each paragraph.
- Leave a blank line between paragraphs.
- Degree of annoyance: 3/5
Signature
- Sign your full name at the end of your message when you email someone you don't know for the first time.
- Don't make your automatically inserted signature block longer than five lines.
- Degree of annoyance: 4/5
Quoting
- Don't quote the whole message you are replying to either before or after your reply unless absolutely necessary.
- Quote only the relevant portions of the original message in the so-called bottom posting and not in the so-called top posting.
- Not to quote a message you are replying to is also bad, though to a lesser extent, as you deprive the recipient of the context of your reply.
- Degree of annoyance: 5/5
Attachments
- Don't send Word attachments indiscriminately; Word is not a document exchange format.
- Use a nonproprietary format such as plain text, HTML/XHTML or PDF if you have to send a document as an attachment.
- Don't send a huge attachment without prior consent of your recipient.
- Degree of annoyance: 5/5
Free Webmail Services
- Webmail is not meant for people who have to deal with heavy traffic of email messages. Even if you don't receive so many messages, it's very inefficient to use the web interface as the sole means of checking email at home.
- Walla, though popular in Israel for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, is probably the most stupid free webmail service on this planet. It sends messages in HTML format as a single part by default with no plain text part, so that if you filter the HTML part of messages for security and privacy reasons, nothing remains for viewing.
- Degree of misery: 5/5
- Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are no less stupid, though in a different way. They can't specify encodings nor support Unicode, so messages you compose, e.g., in Hebrew characters, will look gibberish when they reach your recipients.
- Degree of misery: 4/5
- If you are still stuck in one of these lousy services, please consider migrating to Gmail, which offers a much better service, including the option of using a regular POP mailer such as Thunderbird for its incoming and outgoing messages with no special plugin.
Paragraph Direction
- Information about paragraph direction is not included in plain text messages. Use the following plugins to change the direction from LTR to RTL for Hebrew and other RTL scripts.