Most of us are electronic-mail minimalists. We get new messages, then read them, save, reply and delete them.
Naturally, we create and send a few new messages of our own. And perhaps a few times in each session we forward mail to someone else.
There’s nothing wrong with that, certainly. But sticking to only those few steps is like living in only one room of a large house. You might be more comfortable if you stretched out a little, expanded your life to some of the other rooms.
And you know what? You probably already own that larger home. Pretty much every e-mail program has a surprising number of options that few people use. Stretching will only cost you a little learning time.
What follows are examples from the latest versions of the most popular Internet e-mail programs: America Online (AOL) version 3; Netscape Communicator 4’s mail program, called Messenger; and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4’s mail, called Outlook Express.
All these programs are free. If you have an older version of any of them, some of these same features will be available, though sometimes in slightly different menus and buttons. Except where I mention, all of the notes below apply to both Windows and Macintosh versions of these programs.
– Text styling: Here’s a little extra you may not have noticed: When you compose a message on AOL, you can use a variety of text colors, sizes, styles and alignments. Just click on the icons at the top of the message body area–the blank space on screen where you type your e-mail. These “Rich Text” changes will only be visible if your recipients are on AOL, however.
Netscape Messenger has a similar set of text-changing buttons above its composition area, as well as a Format menu with those and more. You can change the default text style settings under the Edit menu Preferences choice. You’ll notice here that Messenger can also send messages as HTML, the language of the Web, instead of text or Rich Text. That means your e-mail can include clickable Web addresses and other elements of HTML.
Ditto for Outlook Express, which has formatting buttons, menu and Edit-menu preferences and HTML ability. In fact, Outlook can use an HTML file as a kind of template for your e-mail messages.
– Quoting in your reply: E-mail messages are often–and should be–to the point. They don’t need to be full epistles or reports. But brevity may lead to confusion because, unlike most conversations, there are hour- or day-long interruptions between send and receive.
The answer is to copy part of the original message in your reply, or “quote” it. But be sparing. Don’t just repeat the whole thing, or you’ll drive people crazy.
In AOL, whatever you highlight of the original message will be quoted when you click on Reply.
In Netscape Messenger, there is a Quote button above the “message to:” line. Also, you can choose whether to automatically quote a message or not, in the Edit menu’s Preferences for Mail & Groups, Messages, area.
Outlook Express also has quote choices in its Preferences area.
– Signatures: You may want to add some sort of basic identity information to your e-mail and newsgroup contributions. But typing the same “Me, at this address, with this phone number, and that company affiliation” over and over can be a pain.
That’s why there’s the “signature.” This is an identifier that’s automatically appended to every outgoing message. AOL doesn’t have them.
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In Messenger, you’ll find the signature option hidden deep: Edit menu, Preferences choice, Mail & Groups choice, Identity choice and then at the bottom of that window a Signature File line. You simply type up whatever you want, in any program that can save it as a text file, and then specify that file on this line.
Outlook’s Signature option doesn’t have to point to a file, but can simply append the words you type within the Signature box of the Preferences.
– Security through encryption: Quotes and Signatures tell people what you’re talking about and who you are. “Encryption” hides what you’re saying.
Messenger and Outlook let you “encrypt” your message so that only someone with the password can read it. You can also do this with any e-mail program by using a separate encryption utility. But in Messenger, for example, encryption is built in. Click on the Security button, which looks like a padlock, above the “To:” line. In the window that appears, click on the Messenger line on the left, and then you’ll see choices for encrypting mail messages or using Digital Signatures–a way of verifying who sent the message.
– Attachments: If you want to send someone a long document, a spreadsheet, a picture, or pretty much any other kind of information stored on a computer’s hard drive, you can make it an “attachment” to an e-mail message.
That’s the theory, at least. In practice, attachments are more like checked baggage on a nightmare airplane flight: they don’t show up at the other end.
Often this is because they’re too big for some link in the Internet chain. Other times it’s just a mystery why the attachments don’t come through.
And even if they do reach the other end, if the recipient doesn’t have the appropriate program–such as Excel or an Excel-compatible spreadsheet program to open a spreadsheet document–they won’t be able to view the stuff anyway.
They’ll also need to have the same encoder-decoder that you’re using. These have names such as MIME, Uuencode and Binhex. I’d advise you to just experiment to see what works automatically with the e-mail program you have, and if you really need to use attachments, then it will be worth digging into details of encoding.
Still, if you want to experiment with attachments in AOL, just look to the Attach button beside the message composition area. Click on that and then click on the name of the file you want to attach. Remember, large files can take some time to move through slow modems. Then simply click on OK and remember not to move that file until you’ve sent your e-mail. If you move it, the AOL software won’t be able to find it for transmission.
When people send attachments to you, they land on your hard drive. Where on your hard drive? Where you tell them to, courtesy of the File menu’s Download Manager command. There you see a list of recent downloaded attachments. There, too, you can set the destination and the preferences–such as whether to decompress squished “Zip” files as soon as they come in.
To attach files in Messenger, click on the Paperclip icon beside the “To:” line of a message. Outlook also uses a paperclip.