My Loooooooong Email Has Gone Missing!

Email is the medium of choice these days for corresponding. What used to be an informal method of messaging has evolved into a more formal means of sending communications. We used to send off those one-liners that took only minutes to write. Now we are sending entire letters via email. With the advent of the digital signature and the return receipt, we now even have the proof of delivery and non-repudiation issues covered. People are even organizing their email folders filing their emails away for later reference and for keeping track of long threads of discussion.

Having said that, I notice that more and more I will hear someone say that they had spent the last hour or so composing an email only to hit a wrong key and have it disappear before their very eyes. This has more to do with the way many email programs save works in progress. Many of the less sophisticated programs, which many people use, do not automatically save the email as you go along. I use Microsoft Outlook at home, which will save my work in progress in the “Drafts” folder, even if I don’t consciously save it myself. If I accidentally exit out of the email program, I will be prompted to save it before the exit. I also use Lotus Notes at work, which does not save my drafts unless I make a conscious decision to save it before I exit. I have lost a few emails myself with Notes, whereas my Outlook at home has been fairly safe. The other thing to worry about is whether or not you can maintain a permanent copy of your email, or whether or not you can get to it to edit it, even if you are offline. Many web-based emails such as Yahoo and HotMail are convenient, but they don’t store anything on your local computer. Te service provider may even purge documents after a certain length of time.

Rather than scramble around to find an email program that will keep you safe from your own fat fingers, there are some measures you can take to keep from losing a long email. First of all, if you know you are going to write a long email, and your email program doesn’t auto-save for you, save it into your “Drafts” folder right away, and then hit “Save” periodically as you go along. One even better way to do it, especially if you have a long, formal email that you need to draft, is to not draft it using your email program at all. Compose your lengthy message with a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, or whatever word processing program you have installed. Save your letter right away in a “Letters” folder or something. When you are all done, simply highlight all the text and copy it into a new email document. This will give you two benefits: 1) You will now have a permanent copy of your long letter somewhere on your computer besides your mail file (which may or may not be resident on your machine). 2) Your word processing software probably has better spell and grammar checking features than your email program – which means your formal letter is sure to be correct in every way. If you lose your outgoing email, or need another copy of what you wrote, you can retrieve your permanent document and even resend it if necessary.

Just a little tip to help you keep from losing your mind when typing (and losing) those long emails. Save immediately and save often. If you can’t do that in your present email program, then break out the word processor!

SPAM - Are You Part of the Problem?

I feel like griping about something today – so I’ll gripe about SPAM. I’m sure you have noticed that every day your email inbox fills up with messages from people selling everything from online dates to Viagra to pharmaceutical products or even the latest hot stick tip. Friends and family even bombard you daily, telling you the latest jokes, admonishing you to pass on a message - or risk bad luck for the next ten years if you don’t. I am mentioning this because I read an interesting article about how the United States is listed as one of the top SPAM relaying countries in the world.

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=44780

We are spreading SPAM at an incredible rate. We can’t just blame it on the online marketers and scam artists. We are blindly relaying thousands of messages with cute cartoons, jokes, warnings about going to hell if we don’t forward this prayer to 10 friends.

Now to be honest with you – I think all that email that we forward is just innocent fun. A lot of those stories are real tear-jerkers, and at least make us stop and think. But one thing that we should pay attention to a little more is the validity of some of it. I saw one the other day that talked about how Mars was going to pass earth at its closest point in 5,000 years, and be as big as the moon to the naked eye. The email is taken out of context - what they mean is that with 75x magnification that Mars will look as big as the moon - but that's not even the point. The event of Mars coming this close to the earth happened two or three years ago. I have been getting an in-box full of this one this whole week. Mars is over 35 million miles away. C’mon – does that really sound plausible to you that Mars would appear as large as the moon to the naked eye?!

Another of my favorites is the one about the lives of the soldiers who guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Some pretty interesting facts, mingled in with some hyperbole about how they can never drink alcohol or swear for the rest of their lives. Those specifc points turned out to be false, by the way. Or the one about Paul Harvey's essay on school prayer. The email makes some really good points, but it wasn't written by Paul Harvey. The points that the essay make are valid, but is it somehow more credible because Paul Harvey was the one who wrote it? Why not just give the true author credit? Read up on some of these hoaxes before you pass them on. One good site to check is http://www.snopes.com/. Many of these hoaxes are listed there.

The other issue I have is that if people get in the habit of blindly forwarding everything, then they won’t think twice about passing along cleverly crafted messages that can do damage and spread viruses. Even worse - emails of virus hoaxes telling you to delete critical files from your computer are worse than real viruses. The lazy-ass virus perpetrators are too stupid to write their own virus code, so they just get YOU to do their damage for them, and they know that YOU will forward this hoax to all your friends and get them to blindly follow the instructions and hose up their computers.

Furthermore, and as the article I linked above puts it so well, people will believe anything that comes in a nicely packaged email. Get in the habit of maybe scrutinizing this stuff a little, and be more selective about the stuff you pass on. I’m looking at this from purely the perspective of the security geek that I am - so go ahead and call me a party pooper.

This is a problem we’re all going to have to live with, but let’s not be part of the problem. At the very least, keep your email filters tuned up, your virus programs up to date, and be a little more selective about what you pass on to others.

Gotta run - someone just sent me an email about Mars coming close to earth and appearing as big as the moon next month - where's my camera?!

Organizing Your Email

If you're like most people in the modern workplace, even those who work in a small office, you get an average of twenty or so emails a day. I work in a large IT department of an agency in the Federal Government. As you can imagine, my email inbox gets a lot of traffic. I get tasking messages from managers and colleagues, and email from our offices all over the United States asking about various aspects of the duties that I perform. If I were to let those numerous daily emails just sit in my inbox, I would find it harder and harder to sort through the important messages, and find the ones that have the information that I really need later. In this article, I want to share a few hints and tips that have worked for me to help keep the inbox manageable, and to help find those important messages when you need them later.

Reading Your Email:

The fundamental concept that will help keep you sane in the insane world of email is to keep your inbox cleared out! There should be as few messages in the "inbox" folder as possible. Read your email, decide its importance, and either delete it or put it where you can easily find it. Make reading and filing your email a scheduled event if necessary. Find a time in your busy day that you can regularly sit down and go through your messages.

Once you read them you can quickly determine if it is a task someone is giving to you, some important information you might need later, a new policy in the office, or just plain junk. The last type of email that I mentioned (the junk) is easy... delete it! Better yet, put that email filtering feature to work for you, and prevent the garbage from even reaching your inbox in the first place. As I will discuss in just a bit, if you read a message and it has a new task or important policy information, you can easily file it in a folder that will help you keep on top of the important stuff and get those "action items" done.

Create a Folder System:

One of the most important things that I have found is that keeping the clutter out of the inbox is the first step in helping to keep things organized. To help me do this, I have created a folder system that helps me to "file" my messages in a place where I can easily recognize the subject, and to retrieve notes that I will need at a later time. Organize your folder list, and name the folders something that will help you identify what is being kept in them. For instance, in addition to the usual "inbox," "sent," "trash,' and "drafts" folders that are already there, I have created a folder structure that separates the many functions that I am involved in. I have an "Action" folder, and folders for various things like team meetings, committee meetings, publishers/vendors, and others that help me sort out my messages by topic.

The "Action" Folder:

The action folder deserves some special mention. It is in here that I immediately move my messages containing time sensitive or other tasking messages that I receive from others. It sort of becomes a "to-do" list. I read a message in my inbox, and if it is worthy of the "action" folder, I move it there right away. I look in my action folder at the beginning of the day, and again before I go home. I can get an idea of deadlines and urgent replies that I need to pay attention to. Once I have completed the required action, I delete the message, or archive it in the "Filed Messages" folder. Like the inbox, you want to keep your "Action" folder cleared out as much as possible. Little clutter here means that you are responding to those important issues quickly, and will help you easily identify tasks yet to be done.

The "Other" Folders:

Don't forget to check those other folders once in awhile. It would be too easy to forget that you stashed all of those messages somewhere unless you go back and at least review the subject lines. Be sure to clean out the old messages once in awhile as well. If you were saving that piece of email for some information that you thought you would need later, transfer that information to a more permanent place, such as your address book, to-do list, calendar or Palm Pilot.

Delete the messages that aren't serving a purpose any more. Above all, don't play the old "shell game" with your email. Shuffling messages from folder to folder may give you the feeling that you are staying organized, but you are really just sweeping the dirt under the rug, so to speak. Act on it, or get rid of it! I have a simple rule of thumb: If it has been in another folder all year, chances are that I either have the information I need from it, or it just doesn't matter any more :)

Emailing Yourself:

I personally don't do this much, but other people have mentioned that this helps them to remember which messages they have responded to. My replies go into a "Sent" folder, and I just look in there when I need to know which replies I have sent out. You may want that extra assurance, however. You can very easily include yourself as a CC or BCC on a message, and have a copy of it sent to you when you send it out.

While I'm on the subject of having a copy of a sent message - for many short replies or short messages to others, you may not even need a copy of the sent message at all. Remember - every email you save, even those in the "sent" folder takes up space. If it is your computer at home, you are eating up valuable disk space. If it is at work, your friendly email administrators have to back that stuff up - which takes resources. If it is you Internet Service Provider, and you are leaving copies of al your email on the ISP server, that email takes up space - and most ISPs limit the amount of space on their server that you can occupy. If your email program has an option to do so, have it prompt you each time whether or not to even save a copy of your outgoing messages.

Be a Good Email Netizen:

Chances are that someone else that you are emailing is trying to keep themselves organized as well. Be a good "netizen" and put a subject in your email! That's what the subject box is for, and it makes it much easier to scan a list of messages when you are trying to find one that you need later. I know one of my pet peeves is when people send me email with no subject... then I have to read it to find out if it is important or just junk mail. With all the SPAM email, I have filters on my email that automatically deletes messages without subjects. If you send me an email without a subject, I may not even receive it.

Another annoying thing is when people use the subject box to type the first sentence, or even the entire message of their email. That first sentence makes for a loooooooong subject line, often has nothing whatsoever to do with what the email is about, and makes it extremely confusing later when I am searching for a specific subject. Be nice to your readers, put a succinct SUBJECT in there!

When you respond to an email by hitting "Reply with history" be sure to edit the included history to keep the email from "growing" as it is sent back and forth. When emails get volleyed back and forth as part of an ongoing discussion, they tend to grow and grow as the appended history grows from the discussions that have been taking place. Be sure to "snip" out the parts that are no longer germane to the discussion thread. This will help eliminate confusion and frustration (and storage space), as your reader tries to sift through the history to find out what questions this particular email is answering.

Wrapping It All Up:

Staying organized in the world of email is often a difficult task. With a little planning and organization, however, you can make this daily chore a little less painful, and make your messages a little more easy to work with. Keep out the clutter, and especially keep your inbox cleared out. Create an "Action Folder" as a way to keep track of those messages that require immediate attention. Schedule some time every day to read through your emails and file them. Do some housekeeping periodically. And finally.... don't simply shuffle email from folder to folder. Act on it, transfer the information to a more permanent place such as an address book or to-do list, and then get rid of it! Be a good netizen and use subject lines. You'll find that keeping on top of your daily messages will be a bit more organized, and a lot more manageable.