E-Mail Behavior and Batman

Steve and Angela step back from the fray for a moment, and Dawn Chmielewski steps in with a word on e-mail etiquette.

There are a few points of general e-mail etiquette that apparently Emily Post neglected to cover. So here are some things to keep in mind before you press the Send button in your daily life.

• Start at the top. When you're addressing a message, there are only three fields to choose from: To, straightforward enough; Cc for "carbon copy," referring to a technology that most people under age 25 haven't actually seen in real life; and Bcc, meaning "blind carbon copy." Pretty straightforward, right? Not so fast. Blind copies are kind of a sneaky trick, because the person the message is addressed to can't see who else received it. (Of course, sometimes an e-mailer's gotta do what an e-mailer's gotta do.) But Bcc is great on special occasions when you're sending out a big list that you don't want everybody to see--like, say, to a big party. Send the message to yourself, put everybody else in the Bcc field, and they won't get to see who you didn't invite. In normal correspondence, only the people you're communicating with directly need to be in the To field. Everyone else who's getting the message as an "FYI" should go into the Cc field. That way, if you just click Reply, only the To people will get your response. When any of the recipients click the Reply button, only you will get the response. But alas, some people may press the dreaded Reply to All button, which is the leading cause of inbox overload. If someone sends you and nine other people a message asking whether you're available to meet at a particular time, stick with the plain Reply button. If everyone hits Reply to All, everybody will get everyone else's response, and it will generate 100 e-mails, all of them tedious.
• A word about file attachments. Don't send that 5MB photo of you on vacation. Gigantic files--in fact, anything over 1MB--tend to make some folks' mail readers seize up and die. It's particularly bad for road warriors trying to get mail over some hotel's incredibly slow dial-up system.
• Don't be forward. Please, don't forward those too-good-to-be-true offers about free gift certificates for everyone who forwards a particular e-mail. It's a hoax. Don't fall for it. Did you hear the one about the friend who e-mailed a joke to everyone she knows? Dawn has, and she's sick of it. We know where you live. Please, don't do it again. That goes double for chain letters. Break that chain!
• A few words about formatting. Stick to plain text. Don't send mail in HTML Web format or Microsoft's Rich Text with cutesy backgrounds with polka dots and hearts. That stuff's for kids and really ugly Web pages.

Having saved the world (or at least a few inboxes) from karmic unpleasantness, Dawn throws back to the big desk, where Jesse writes from cyberspace: "Dear Digital Duo: Were you the same duo that had the television show back in the sixties? If so, which one of you is Batman and which one is Robin?"

Somebody gave those two lunatics masks, but that doesn't mean the results ought to be recapped; in fact, today we've learned that some images really aren't worth a thousand words. However, Jesse's 30 words prove to be worth a Piñata prize--a jingle bell. Add a floppy cap and more bells, and he'll be not just a mere joker, but a full-fledged jester.