Email

Email is a handy and powerful communication tool if used correctly. It rarely is. I suspect it is a sign of the times.

Email (or e-mail) is short hand for "electronic mail." It bothers me that people forget the word "mail" is plural. There is a widespread misconception that "mails" is correct usage of the word. It is not. You do not receive "emails" or "mails". You receive email, mail or messages.

Email makes it easy to quickly get a message to a large number of recipients. When writing to such an audience, care should be taken in ensuring grammar, typing and spelling are correct. This is rarely done, because "it's just a quick note."

I have a number of rules I want you to adhere to, if you send me email.

1. Never forward me junk email (e.g. virus warnings, chain letters, reports of money to be won, stories of sick little children, etc). I do not care.
2. Send your message in plain text. Mail sent as HTML, Rich Text Format, etc is filtered and deleted without me ever knowing it was sent. [Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text]
3. Ensure your email client wraps lines correctly at 72-76 chars per line.
4. When quoting, remove irrelevant lines of text, and type your comments below the quoted text.
5. Do not attach virtual business cards or other output of "nifty" features that your email client supports.
6. If you want me to see a webpage, paste the address into a note. Do not use your browsers integrated function to download and attach the HTML document to the email.
7. Do not send me files unless you are certain I understand the contents, and have fully agreed to receive the file(s). If you have the least bit of doubt wether to send me a certain file or not, do not send it.
8. If you send me executable files ever I will probably kill you.
9. For various mailbox-sorting-reasons I require that you set the time of your computer correctly. I will assume you have nothing worthwhile to say if you cannot even manage to set the time of your computer.

If you are unable to comply with the above, do not attempt to communicate with me. If my requirements seem unreasonable to you, please keep it to yourself. I do not care.