Ever since e-mails have taken over us, the world has finally become a small place. Now a days, e-mail has become as much a part of our lives as the telephone. According to the Yankee Group a research firm, there are 263 million e-mail boxes in the world. According to surveys, the number of e-mails sifted through in a day by an average worker is about 30. When we are so much dependent on computers to do lot of work for us, we need to know some e-mail etiquette or netiquette.
    Netiquette can be defined as behaving appropriately on the net. Just like good manners are appreciated in real life, good manners on the net are appreciated too.
Remember: do not lower your prestige on the Net. Here are some notions of etiquette for a happy mailing:

Selecting Your Id

    Choose an e-mail service of your choice like hotmail, yahoo mail, mailsify, rediffmail, etc. You can also have multiple e-mail accounts at different services. But remember the more the number of accounts the more unmanageable it gets to handle the mail. A nice suggestion is to have just two or three services. Another suggestion is to have the same user name and password for all the e-mail services. This saves the trouble of remembering passwords. It is also better to take up a user-id, which has his/her complete name. This greatly helps the receiver to identify you. : Any one receiving your mail knows instantly that it is you! And please avoid choosing absurd names such as ms33p@rediffmail.com, and the likes!

Terminologies

    When you do compose the e-mail, try avoiding chatting terminologies as much as possible. Remember friends, you may be an expert at those terminologies, but it might not be the same with the person receiving it. Terms like plz, re, wat, 2, s look glitzy but it seems as if the other person has typed out in a hurry!

Before Replying

    This is a common problem. I would rather say that majority of people tend to use the 'REPLY' button to mail back. Fine! But at least make sure that you have deleted the former content. Believe me, not many people actually do this...when all it takes is a CTRL+A and then DEL key. The whole exercise will not take 3 seconds. Also, please at least change the subject line from Re: hi to hi! The advantage of doing this is that the receiver will get a neater mail and also saves the precious Kilobytes of the mail by making it smaller.

Mail in Text Format

    One should try to send mails in TEXT format as much as possible.A fancy software like OUTLOOK 2000 offers a person to actually have a HTML background with so many wallpapers and showy handwriting. It might look good to the person sending it but remember, the receiver is going to take a lot of time downloading it, especially on a slow Internet connection! Avoid using HTML as much as possible. Also, nowadays, e-cards have become quite famous. Use them only if you feel it is absolutely necessary.

Sending Group Mail

    This happens all the time. One should be careful of forwarding mails and other stuff. Always try to use BCC field instead of CC field because you are openly displaying all the e-mail ids to all the people you sent the mail to and secondly, the size of the mail again bloats. Use 'BCC' field whenever you forward an interesting thing or jokes to many people. Be sure to forward all jokes, funny or beautiful pictures to your friends. They love it. Do not forward non-veg jokes to a friend whose parents also check the same account.

Avoid Hoax Mail

    Many a time you start getting e-mails out of nowhere, informing you about the offers. More often than not, they end up being a nuisance to the user. A safe way would be to use the junk mail option in hotmail so that you do not have to see them at all...or block the sender's option, there by avoiding them totally.
Blocking the sender also has an advantage of retaining the membership of the site it comes from, as well as avoiding the seeing of those maiils.

Beware of Attachments

    Attachment is probably a very delicate thing. So care should be taken while opening those attachments. Try to be careful with .exe and .doc extensions, as these may have the highest number of viruses that could take a toll on your system. Try to scan your attachments before opening them. Never open mails from an untrusted source as you do not have the faintest idea where it comes from. Such mails are better off deleted. And above all, do not forget to delete regularly all those mails, which you no longer require or have done away with.

    While we are on the subject of forwarding jokes and attachments, do not send virus alerts to anyone! Virus alerts that come to you via e-mail are more than likely a hoax. If you are convinced the virus alert may be real, check www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html - a fantastic site with a great up-to- date listing of the rubbish virus alerts floating around on e-mail. And above all, your best defence against a virus is an up-to-date anti-virus programme installed on your PC.

Remember that e- mail is a powerful tool to solidify relations;but never forget that it can undo them as well.

Courtesy : Deepika Education