How to use email

Email can be an efficient, accessible, versatile and agreeable means of communication if some time-proven best practices are adopted. See these sources for more information:

• the Wikipedia article on Netiquette.
• another article on Mailing List Etiquette.
• the Request For Comments of the IETF.
• the advantages of using interleaved style in email discussions.
• a Scientific American article on the security risks of webmail.

Best practices also exist for the technology used to write, send and process emails:

• Vim is a very mature text editor, that can be integrated in (good) email clients. Vim supports the most efficient text editing possible, on all possible computing platforms, large and small. So, it really pays off to learn how to use it! (Starting up the vim programme gives immediate access to a built-in tutorial.)
• the use of HTML as the basis of email exchange works nice for one-way traffic, but is bad for discussions that go back-and-forth a couple of times. The problem is not so much in the HTML format itself, but in the lack of standardization for the quoting of excerpts from earlier messages in a discussion thread. Hence, avoid top-posting—because this makes one loose the context of a conversation—and rely instead on a purely text-based/HTML-less interleaved quoting style instead.
• Even the world's lousiest email client, Outlook, can be configured to support such text-only interleaved style:
  • In File → Options → Mail → Compose Messages indicate Plain text
  • In File → Options → Mail → Replies and Forwards indicate Prefix each line of original message, Include original message, and set Prefix with... to a ">"
  • In File → Options → Mail → Message Format indicate Convert to Plain text
  • In File→ Options→ Trust Center→ Email security indicate Read all standard mail as plain text
  Alternatively, install this macro for Outlook.