Email Guidelines
Email is fundamentally a form of communication; it is about
communicating thoughts and ideas. If you are not getting your
message across then it is not succeeding. Unfortunately, there are
a lot of things that people commonly do that make email hard (or
boring) to read and hamper communication. If you want to write
effective email, this document contains some rules and guidelines
which can help. Similarly, there are hints on receiving and
reading email so that you and your computer do not get burnt.
At CSE, it is worth noting that we work on a multitude of different
types of computer systems and there is a major problem in sending
mail from one type of system to another type of system.
Particularly, many people in the School do not use Microsoft
products and sending them Excel spreadsheets or Word documents is
generally not useful (except to annoy them). Similarly, Macintosh
systems tend to send attachments encoded with "binhex" which are
then unreadable on any non-Macintosh computer. Nevertheless, with
just a little care email can be used for very effective communication.
How to read email; and write email that people will read
(also available in pdf,
dvi,
postscript and
ascii text).
Other references worth exploring include:
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