Signatures
If you had to guess what a signature was (the e-mail version), you would probably be close.
On a paper document (save a tree, send e-mail) it's typical to close the document with the following:
Gene Wicker, Jr.
I Will Follow... Services
Since it's not possible (yet) to sign your e-mail, users will sometimes include the same information (minus the signature) at the bottom of their e-mail messages.
I would highly recommend this practice because the originator is not always clear to the recipient. Lots of companies use abbreviated names or numbers for employee e-mail addresses and those abbreviations or numbers will mean little to someone not familiar with their significance.
I would also recommend that you included your e-mail address in this information. Sometimes it can be very difficult to locate your e-mail address in the information that's a part of transmission, especially if it's going across the Internet.
If your e-mail address is a business address, I would include your title and company name in the signature. Normally, this might be part of a letterhead, but in the e-mail world letterheads are not used (wasted space).
You will sometimes run across a user's signature that contains a quote (as in "...the secret to life is that there is no secret.") after the person's name. This has become a fairly common practice. If you choose this option I would recommend that the quote be something that is a reflection of yourself. Keep it short. You don't want the quote to be longer than the message.
Also you will run across signatures that contain images built out of keyboard characters. These are kind of hard to describe unless you've seen one, but you will surely know one when you see it. As with the quote, the image should be a reflection of the person.
Whether you choose to add a quote, an image or both, I would recommend that you keep the total number of lines for the signature down to four or less.
Attachments
Back in dial-up days I would have recommended that all attachments be held to 1MB in size. However, in today's ever expanding broadband world, things are a little different.
For users on dial-up, the 1MB limit still applies. For users on broadband or a direct connection, I would up the limit to 5MB. HOWEVER, this is not a blanket recommendation to send attachments of this size. Even if user is on broadband or a direct connection, there is no guarantee that their mailbox can handle it. With limits this small you can see that sending someone a 5MB attachment will quickly fill their mailbox and cause other e-mails to bounce.
Generally, the only time I send attachments of the 5MB size is when I know the other party is expect it.
vCards
vCards are simply a nightmare for a user of Outlook (which I am). They make every e-mail appear as if it has an attachment. It does in one respect, but it's not what you would normally consider an attachment i.e. a document, a spreadsheet, etc. Therefore, I recommend against using them.
Threads
Once you send that first e-mail, you will probably get a response. If you want to reply to that response what should you do? The wrong thing to do is to start a new e-mail message. This breaks the link (called a "thread") between the original message and your soon-to-be-created response. Without the link, it can get difficult for the users on each end to follow the sequence of messages, especially after several exchanges. This becomes an even larger problem when you are dealing with newsgroups (more later) where several people may be replying to messages and trying to follow the thread of exchanged information. The correct thing to do is to reply, which is essentially the same thing as creating a new message, but maintains the thread.
Quotes
Nothing is more wasteful than to reply to an e-mail by including a complete copy of the original with the words "I agree", "Okay" or "Ditto" at the bottom.
The correct method is to use quoting. This is best explained by an example:
>and do you agree with the proposal to hire Ms. Ross to
>handle our legal services?
Yes. Please make the necessary arrangements.
The '>' in front of the text indicates to the recipient that this is quoted material from his/her last e-mail message. The second sentence is your response to the quoted material. The key with quoting is to include enough material in the quote so that it will be relevant to the recipient. Imagine that the original message was a hundred lines long and the only question that required a response was located in the last sentence. Why send the whole message back in the reply? That would cause the recipient to scroll through the hundred line message again just to find your response at the bottom.
Quoting can occur again and again as in the example:
>>and do you agree with the proposal to hire Ms. Ross to
>>handle our legal services?
>
>Yes. Please make the necessary arrangements.
Arrangements made. Our first meeting is scheduled for tomorrow morning.
From this we see both two level quoting (>>) and one level quoting (>). The (>>) indicate that the sender is quoting your quote and the (>) is a quote of part of your message you sent in reply.
Don't get hung up in quoting. After so many levels, all you end up with is a bunch of ">" and very little substance.
Save A Tree
Sometimes I think that the best thing that could happen would be for someone to take away the printer. Why? Every time I send an e-mail out to a large group, a third of the group will print the message even before reading it, a third will read it and then print it, and the last third will simply delete it.
One of the goals for e-mail usage is to eliminate (or greatly reduce) the shuffling of paper, but what chance does that have if a significant number of people are going to print every message they receive. I'm not saying that all messages should not be printed. I'm saying that too many messages are printed for no reason (a lot are printed and never retrieved from the printer).
Unless you have a very primitive e-mail system, it probably has some system (usually called "folders") that can be used to permanently store messages for recall at any time in the future. If the same people who print messages for paper file systems would create the same structure in the e-mail system with folders, it would accomplish the same goal, but would save an enormous amount of paper (and trees).
Privacy, Are You Kidding?
Stop right where you are and set aside a couple of brain cells for the following statement: there is no such thing as a private e-mail. I don't care what anybody says, states, swears or whatever, there is just no such thing as private e-mail. The reason? Keep reading.
With some e-mail systems, the e-mail administrator has the ability to read any and all e-mail messages. If this is the case where you are located you better hope that there is a honest and respectable person in that position.
Some companies monitor employee e-mail (I consider this one of the worst forms of censorship). The reasons for this obtrusive behavior range from company management wanting to make sure users