Senior News November, 2001 Vol. 20. No.  11

 

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Greeting cards, sewing-Eighty years of art keeps revealing new forms

InfoVan: Information moves out into county

Emergency preparedness is a high priority

Del Norte Historical Society celebrates 50

World Senior Games

Electronic Highway- E-mail netiquette

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Electronic Highway- E-mail netiquette
by Barbara Clark

I don't often appear as myself in Senior News. Mostly I copy edit other people's writing and occasionally write a feature story, rarely a column.

But this month I want to pick a bone with new and olde-mailers. Especially since the Sept. 11th tragedy I have been receiving hundreds of e-mails every week, both at Senior News and at home-everything from prayers for world peace from global visionaries and mystics like Thich Nhat Hanh and Barbara Kingsolver to petitions to help the horrible plight of the Afghan women.

I have only forwarded three of these many writers, and those only to two select groups: my women's group from the Bay Area which talks daily through an e-mail conversation and my local church e-list.

If you do elect to forward material to enormous e-lists of your own, please learn how to use your e-mail program to hide your lists of addresses. Every time someone forwards me that petition about the plight of the Afghan women, I also receive probably 20 additional messages a day for the next week from junk e-mailers who have gleaned my e-mail address from the petition.

Seeking a solution for this e-malady, I checked with Barry Savage, the Senior Resource Center (HSRC) computer lab coordinator, to find out what we all need to do to solve the problem. He gave me some ideas.

Hiding e-addresses
Whenever you send to a bulk list, you can mail the message to yourself and put your bulk list in the "bcc" section of your e-mail page. That stands for blind carbon copy, and it won't list everyone's addresses in the piece of mail.

Forwarding
Don't automatically hit the forwarding button when you read a message you like. If you do, it will arrive in everyone else's e-box with unnecessary characters at the beginning of every line and pages of addresses.

Instead, take the time to select the entire message, copy it, and paste it into the body of a new message. You can carefully go through it, delete any e-mail addresses you see and the repetitive "to" and "from" lines from a piece that has been forwarded a dozen times. Then put your bulk list into the "bcc" (blind carbon copy) line rather than the "to" line. The message goes off happily to your list of friends, and none of them are bugged by giving their e-mail addresses to the world.

Sending attachments
Check with your recipient before you send any attachments and find out if they want to receive them.

If I don't have enough computer memory, Word documents sent as an attachment mean that I can't look at my e-screen and see what the person wanted to say and whether I'm interested in the message. Instead, I have to shut down my mail program, open my Word program and read the message.

Attachments are the way that all the viruses are being spread.

Don't send unsolicited photographs. Photographs take a long time to download for people who don't have newer high-end computers.

Reply all
Unless you are part of a group that has agreed it wants to read everyone's reply, don't hit the "reply all" button on your e-mail program. Chose a simple reply so that your one-line replies to a sender are not repeated to the sender's entire list.

A learning curve
Netiquette is part of the learning curve of using this now vital communications link. When people use these practices for their e-mail correspondence, everyone will have more time and energy for the real communication-we won't be overloaded with lines and lines of unwanted addresses, text and advertising.

If you would like some assistance in learning how to do these steps, come to the HSRC computer lab Monday through Thursdays, 1-3 p.m. A $2 charge will get you all the help and practice that you need.

Barbara Clark is editor of Senior News. Her e-mail address is srnews@northcoast.com. E-mail her today and show her what you've learned!

Useful sites

* www.urbanlegends.com to check out whether an e-mail warning is a fraud.
* www.vmyths.com to check out if a virus warning is true.
* www.humsenior.org for the Senior Resource Center.