Let’s go to the next level—web links, attachments, and more
As you’ve discovered by now, e-mail is a wonderful way to stay in touch with family and friends. It’s also an efficient means to communicate with co-workers and business associates. But surely it can’t replace snail mail entirely. What if you apply for a job and your prospective employer wants a copy of your résumé? That would require the U.S. Postal Service, right? No, not really. What if you want your daughter to send pictures from your grandson’s graduation? She’d have to mail them, right? Not anymore. Sit back and let me explain. But before we get into attachments, let’s go over some other e-mail details you should know as you become more experienced on your computer.
Web-based e-mail does not require software to be installed on your computer but instead allows you to access all of its features from a website. That means you don’t have to use your own computer to get the e-mail. You could be on any computer anywhere in the world and access your e-mail. Many web-based e-mail services are free, such as Yahoo, Gmail (Google mail), and Hotmail.
As I said in Chapter 14, your computer may have come with e-mail services already installed, such as Outlook, Entourage, or Apple Mail. Microsoft Outlook comes bundled in the Microsoft Office Suite software. Outlook offers you e-mail, a calendar, an address book, task and content management, and a journal. Entourage is the Mac version of Outlook designed by Microsoft. It also offers e-mail along with a task manager and a personal information manager that will organize your calendar, addresses, and notes, as does Apple Mail. The advantage of all these, over web-based e-mail accounts, is that you can access previously received or sent e-mails and write e-mail without connecting to the Internet. Your newly drafted e-mails will be held in your computer’s memory until you connect to the Internet and send them.
Because free e-mail accounts are available to you, why not have more than one e-mail address, as mentioned in Chapter 16? Consider having a secondary e-mail address that you use when making purchases or when being added to a newsletter or desired mailing list. This will help prevent too much junk mail from being received in your primary e-mail account.
“It took me quite some time to get used to how casual e-mail is. Now I appreciate the lack of formality.”
—Grant
Netiquette was introduced to you back in Chapter 14, but here are some additional guidelines to keep in mind.
• Remember you are corresponding with a human being. No matter how faceless and casual e-mail may appear, abrupt and curt e-mails are rude. I open my e-mails with “hello” or “dear…” I close with “best,” “cheers,” or maybe just my initials.
• Less is more. Not to contradict my previous point, but convey your message in sentences rather than paragraphs. A lot of people read e-mail at work, where time is limited, and a computer screen is no place to read a novel. If you must write a lengthy e-mail, use paragraphs to break up the text. Avoid indentation because the format of your e-mail may change through transmission. Indentations can make e-mail difficult to decipher.
• Try to be specific in your subject line. Unless you’re writing a chatty hello, don’t bother with a benign “hi” or “it’s me” for a subject. Let the recipient know specifically what the e-mail is about. It allows him or her to prioritize and identify it at a later date.
• Watch what you say. E-mail is easily forwarded, and really remarkable ones can make the rounds all the way to the news.
• Do not lose your cool. Serious matters of the heart or workplace warrant one-on-one interactive audio projection dialogue (in other words, speaking face-to-face). As is possible with any writing, but especially in this abbreviated form, e-mails can be open for misinterpretation. If you’re determined to send a scathing e-mail, send it to yourself first, and feel what it’s like to receive your harsh words.
• Discriminate about how and what e-mail you pass on. Just because you received an e-mail doesn’t mean the contents are true or worthy of passing on to your loved ones, acquaintances, the pharmacist, your milkman, and that lady you sat next to on the bus. If you must share an e-mail, be sure to tidy it up before you hit Send. Read “Break the Chain” on page 236 for instructions on the tidiest way to share an e-mail.
• Include the portion of the e-mail you refer to. If someone asks questions in an e-mail, sending them the answers alone may cause confusion. Either include their entire e-mail for reference or the specific text relating to your responses. You can use copy and paste as described on page 237 to bring chosen text from one e-mail into another.
• Reread the e-mail address and message before you click on Send. I’ve warned my students to be cautious about inputting the correct recipient for years and recently found my face red when a slightly bawdy e-mail I wrote accidentally made its way to an elderly student rather than the intended close friend. Oops! Check for typos and spelling errors as well. Most e-mail services offer spell check capabilities.
• If you feel like it, add visual expression to your words. Use emoticons to add a little levity or emotion to your e-mail.
“I am so sick of getting e-mails that have obviously been forwarded several times before I was added to the heap of recipients.”
—Jimenez
WARNING: If you or others you know use a work e-mail account for personal matters, beware. (Work e-mail can be identified by the company name as the suffix of the e-mail address, e.g., johndoe @westinghouse.com.) The employer owns the e-mail account and has a legal right to view all incoming and outgoing e-mail. Not only can this prove embarrassing, but it also reveals, by virtue of the volume of personal e-mail received or sent, time spent on one’s private life and not work. Companies are monitoring work e-mail accounts more and more. You should open a personal e-mail account for yourself, if you haven’t, and stop using work e-mail for personal communications.
At some point you will receive an e-mail warning of a terribly destructive virus or relating a tragic story of a child suffering from cancer or a chain letter that cautions if you don’t send the e-mail on to ten friends bad luck will befall you, but if you do, good luck or even money will come your way. It is only responsible for you to send the e-mail on to loved ones who should be warned, may want to help, or are in need of luck or miraculous funds. Or is it?
What if the e-mail is a hoax? Most of these types of e-mails are designed to see how many people can be reached. Or, even more insidious, the e-mail addresses accumulated in the forwarded e-mails are culled by spammers to fill inboxes with junk mail. Before you decide to pass on this type of e-mail, check to see if it is a hoax at hoaxbusters.org.
If you deem the e-mail worthy of sending on, do not click on Forward and possibly forward all of the past e-mail recipients into the land of spam. Instead, copy and paste the important text into a new e-mail. While you’re at it, let’s not expose each recipient to the other’s e-mail address. Use BCC: (for guidance, see page 239) instead of using TO: or CC: when addressing the e-mail.
• The technique of copy and paste was introduced to you on page 206 in Chapter 15. If you haven’t yet used copy and paste, feel free to go back and review. With e-mail you’ve received there’s only one way to highlight the text to be copied. You must click and drag over the text. The easiest way to accomplish this is to start at the end of the text.
• Open the e-mail that contains the text you want to copy.
• Place the mouse arrow, which probably now is the mouse I-beam, at the end of the chosen text.
• Click and hold down the mouse while you drag across the text to the left and then straight up until you reach the start of the text. (If you’re using a touch pad, this may require both hands.)
CLICK AND GO
1. Highlight text.
2. Click Edit.
3. Click Copy.
4. Click Compose.
This is a tricky operation and may take a few attempts before you get it right. Be patient. You will conquer it, I promise. If you don’t succeed in highlighting the desired text, click the mouse anywhere in the window to eliminate the erroneous highlighting and try again at the end of the desired text.
• Once the text is highlighted, click on Edit in the Menu Bar.
• Click on Copy. (Most e-mail will not allow you to cut.)
• Click on either Write or Compose or New to open a new e-mail.
• Click inside the text area of the new e-mail where you normally type your message. A blinking line should appear.
• Click on Edit in the Menu Bar.
• Click on Paste.
Finito! The text is now in a new e-mail with no trace of its past journeys. Well done.
CLICK AND GO
1. Click in text message area.
2. Click Edit.
3. Click Paste.
• You have a choice of using the TO:, CC:, or BCC: boxes for your e-mail recipients.
Let’s send this e-mail to a group without exposing the recipients to each other’s e-mail addresses. Each e-mail service works slightly differently, so you may have to find where you activate BCC: instead of TO: when addressing an e-mail. You might have to click on Add BCC: to reveal the BCC: address area. If you select recipients from your e-mail address book, you may choose the BCC: option at that time. Some e-mail services require there be at least one address in the TO: box. Why not type your e-mail address in the TO: box and then delete the e-mail when you receive it? That’s also a good way to know if the e-mail went out and you won’t have exposed any of your recipients’ e-mail addresses to each other.
Be sure to type in a Subject so the recipients know what the e-mail is about. Off it goes!
When I’m planning a trip with my mother I’ll often do online research about our destination before we depart. If I come across a website that Mom will find useful, I’ll send her the website address embedded in an e-mail. Because website addresses can get very long and gibberishy, I certainly don’t want to have to trust myself to retype it all. Instead I can copy and paste it into the e-mail.
CLICK AND GO
1. Click on website address box to highlight.
2. Click Edit.
3. Click Copy.
4. Minimize the window or click the tab for your e-mail.
5. Click on e-mail window.
6. Click in text area.
7. Click on Edit.
8. Click on Paste.
Try it yourself. Before going through the specific steps to embed the web link (copy and paste a web address into an e-mail), open up your e-mail account and have a blank e-mail waiting for the link. Shrink your e-mail account by clicking on the 
Minimize Box or 
Collapse Box. Now, open another Internet window and go to the web page that you would like to share. I’m going to send my mother the Amtrak train schedule from New York to Boston.
• Highlight the web address by clicking once on the web address at the top of the window. (If you have a Mac, you’ll have to click in the far left corner of the web address box on the icon.)
• Click on Edit.
• Click on Copy.
• Minimize the browser window and open the e-mail window that is waiting in the Task Bar or click on your e-mail tab.
• Click in the message text area.
• Click on Edit.
• Click on Paste.
Voilà! Now you can finish the e-mail, type in a subject, put in the recipient’s e-mail address, and off it goes!
• If the mouse arrow becomes a hand, it is an indication that the embedded web link can be accessed with a click of the mouse.
When you receive an e-mail with a link it in, you usually should be able to simply click on the link to go to the intended website. If for some reason the link is not active or working, you can copy and paste it into the website address box at the top of the window and then visit the suggested site. Receiving an e-vite or e-card is a common way to receive a link embedded in an e-mail. An e-vite is an invitation via e-mail, and an e-card is a greeting card sent via e-mail. Visit evite.com to access free e-vite invitations and 123greetings.com to access free greetings cards.
“I was totally intimidated by attachments until I finally opened one. I felt foolish being so timid when it wasn’t a big deal at all.”
—Nicholas
An attachment is anything you send along with an e-mail. It could be a document (e.g., a poem you wrote, driving directions, your résumé, your favorite recipe, etc.), a photograph, or even a movie or song. Let’s go with the résumé scenario… In the days before computers, you’d type your résumé (then probably make photocopies of it or have a printing company produce copies for you). Next, you’d compose a cover letter either by hand or on a typewriter. Then, you would paper-clip a copy of your résumé to the cover letter. Your résumé would now be attached to the cover letter and would become an attachment.
In theory, it’s no different with e-mail. Instead of typing your résumé on a typewriter, you type it on the computer, where it’s stored to print at will or, in this case, attach to an e-mail. Next, you access your e-mail account and compose the e-mail that will accompany your résumé. Lastly, you instruct the computer to fetch the stored résumé and attach it to the e-mail. All you do then is click Send and off it goes! No trip to the post office, no waiting in line, and your dispatch arrives at its destination within minutes. Don’t worry, we’ll go through the process step by step together. But before we send an attachment, let’s discuss receiving one.
Check out the sample e-mail shown here. Your e-mail service may look different, but all e-mail services offer the same components. Relax, take your time, and figure out how this illustration relates to your e-mail service.
Your e-mail service uses a symbol to indicate that an e-mail contains an attachment. Nearly all services use a paper clip 
as seen here. AOL employs 
. Make yourself take notice of whether an e-mail has an attachment or not.
• An e-mail with an attachment in Yahoo Mail. The paper clip indicates there is an attachment.
To view an attachment, you must first open the e-mail it was sent with. Then you open or download the attachment. Before going forward with opening the e-mail, ask yourself, “Do I know the sender?” E-mail attachments are one of the ways to unleash a virus onto your computer. If I receive an e-mail with an attachment and I don’t recognize the sender, I’ll delete the e-mail without opening it to protect my computer from a possible virus. (I routinely delete unopened e-mails from unknown senders to lessen the spam on my computer as well.)
Here are instructions for you to follow to download an attachment received in Yahoo! Feel free to read through them now, but don’t expect the information to make sense until you’re in front of the computer with an actual attachment.
• Open the e-mail as you usually do.
• Move the mouse arrow onto the name of the attachment or the paperclip. Don’t be surprised if the mouse arrow now appears as a hand. (Remember, the hand is a positive indication that if you click there something will open for you.)
• An attachment in Yahoo! mail.
• In the case of Yahoo!, either click on the name of the attachment or the words Save To Computer to the right of the attachment. With your e-mail service, you may instead click on Download, Download Now, or Open. (If a single-click doesn’t do the trick, try a double-click.)
• Yahoo! automatically scans attachments for viruses (a real plus) and lets you know if they find anything suspicious. If no viruses are found, next click on Download Attachment. You may need to use the Scroll Bar to move down the page to expose Download Attachment.
• You have the choice to either open the attachment or save it. If it’s an attachment you want to view once and discard, then click Open. If it’s an attachment you want to keep, at least for a while, then click Save. For the sake of an exercise, I’ll show you what to do to save the attachment. Click on Save.
• A window opens for you to decide where you want to save the attachment. (This is an important step because if you don’t take command of where you put the attachment, you’ll have trouble finding it later.) Click on the down arrow to the right of the location listed in the window. A drop-down menu appears; click Desktop. This instructs the computer to download the attachment to your Desktop—an easy place to find it later, but not where you’d want it to live permanently. Eventually you’ll want to organize the documents on your Desktop into a filing system. We’ll get to that in Chapter 20. Notice the name of the attachment, so you can identify it later. You can also change the name at this point to whatever you’ll remember.
CLICK AND GO
1. Click on down arrow.
2. Click on Desktop.
3. Note the name of the attachment.
4. Click Save.
• Now click on Save and wait. Depending on the size of the attachment (photos are slower to download than most documents because they take up more space) and what type of connection you have (a dial-up is slower than high speed), this could take as long as a minute or two. (Unfortunately, some files can be too big for a dial-up to handle and may not download at all, yet another reason for you to consider a high-speed Internet connection.)
• The attachment may have opened on the screen for you to view. If it didn’t, you can shrink your e-mail window. Remember the Minimize Box ( for PC or for Mac). Click to minimize the window.
• The attachment will now be one of the icons on the Desktop.
• Double-click on it to open. If necessary, maximize the attachment (
for PC or 
for Mac).
Fun, isn’t it? When you decide you no longer want the item on your computer, you can click and drag it into the Recycle Bin or the Trash.
To download or upload simply means to move something from one place to another. Here’s an example of downloading: The weather warms up and I download my summer clothes from the top of my closet to my dresser. An attachment gets downloaded to your computer from the e-mail it was attached to. When you send an attachment, you upload it from your computer to an e-mail and send it.
Sometimes, however, when people try to download an attachment, they don’t succeed and they blame themselves or their computer. There are several possible reasons for this failure to download, but the most likely is that the format of the attachment isn’t compatible with the computer attempting the download. This is neither the user’s fault nor the computer’s. Let me explain: The word “file,” in computer-speak, refers to written documents, photographs, music clips, or movies. Anything that contains data is called a file (not to be confused with file folders, which contain multiple files). Every file, regardless of whether it is text or image or sound, is created using a particular software program. The same software program that was used to create the file is usually necessary at the other end to view the attachment when received. For example, if someone sends you a document written using Microsoft Word, you need Microsoft Word on your computer to view that document. Think of it this way: Computer software programs are a language. Your computer needs to speak the same language as the attachment in order to read the attachment.
Hang in there while I show you the most common formats for an attachment. In Chapter 15 (on page 201) we talked about naming a document. You choose the name of a document or a photo (both known as a file) on your computer. Each file also has a suffix, or extension, that you don’t choose, which identifies the format (designated software program) of that file. As an example, a Microsoft Word document ends in .doc. Remember the document we created and named “smile” in Chapter 15? In fact, “smile.doc” is its full name.
Here’s a list of the most common suffixes you may encounter:
.doc or .docx = Microsoft Word document
.xls or .xlsx = Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
.pdf = Adobe Acrobat portable document file
.ppt = Microsoft Power Point Presentation
.cwk = Apple Works document
.mov = QuickTime movie
.wav = sound file
.jpg = a graphic or image
.zip = compressed data
If you receive and download an attachment and the name of the attachment ends in .doc, the Microsoft Word software program must be installed on your computer to view the attachment. A pattern will begin to emerge for you of attachment file types you can and cannot open. If you receive an e-mail attachment but it won’t open, you have the option to e-mail the sender, let them know what attachments you have successfully opened (e.g., “I can open Word, which ends in doc, and Excel, which ends in xls, and photographs if they end in jpg.”), and place the burden on them to convert the attachment to a format your computer can read.
Now let’s upload an attachment to an e-mail to send. The same instructions apply whether you’re sending a document or a photo. Before we can begin the process of uploading, decide what you want to attach. Do you know where it lives on your computer? (i.e., Desktop, Documents, etc.). Do you know the name of it? During the upload process, you must tell the computer where to find the file to upload, so you need to know where it is and what it’s called. The process doesn’t start with opening or viewing the item you want to attach. It starts with your e-mail. This time let’s use Gmail as an example for sending an attachment.
• Open your e-mail account and click on Write, New, Compose, or Create to generate an e-mail. It’s easy to put in the recipient’s e-mail address, compose the e-mail, and forget to actually attach the file. To circumvent forgetting, we’ll attach first and write later.
• Click on either the paper clip 
, Attach Files, or Attach. The more comfortable you become with the computer, the more you’ll be able to look around a window and instinctively find what you seek. Remember you may need to use the Scroll Bar to reveal what you need. Take your time, remain calm, and be patient with yourself and the computer.
• Each e-mail service is slightly different regarding what you click on to attach a file.
CLICK AND GO
1. Click on Attach a File.
2. Click on desired item to attach.
3. Click Open.
4. Fill in the address, subject, e-mail message.
5. Click Send.
• With most e-mail services, you click on Find, Browse, or Choose File to direct the computer to the item to be attached.
• A window appears (similar to the window when you downloaded). Again, you’ll click on the arrow to navigate to where the attachment lives. Once you find the item to be attached, either click on the name of it, then click on Open or Attach, or you can double-click on the name.
• The attachment name will appear either near the subject area of the e-mail or you may need to scroll down to see it at the bottom of the e-mail. You have attached a file to an e-mail! Congratulations!
• Now fill in the recipient’s e-mail address, subject, and type a note. Be sure to mention the existence of an attachment in the subject or the message. Cautious e-mailers won’t open attachments unless they know the sender consciously sent it, just in case it’s a virus that attached itself without the knowledge of the sender.
How are you doing? Are attachments, both sent and received, making sense? I hope so.
Up until now, we’ve been dealing with a file (document) that already exists on your computer. Hmmm… how do you get a document or a photo onto your computer if you don’t receive it as an attachment and it’s not a document you wrote and saved yourself? We’ll discuss using a digital camera and a scanner to get images onto your computer in the next chapter.
Wow! You’ve come a long way. It seems like only yesterday that you and your computer met for the first time. Now here you are uploading and downloading. Please return to this chapter as often as you need when you’ve received an attachment or have a masterpiece of your own to send, and you want a little support. Don’t forget to visit abbyandme.com for additional advice on e-mail and attachments. It would be my pleasure to be of assistance.
Q: How do I save an e-mail I want to keep?
A: Some e-mail services will store your e-mails permanently; others may only store them for as little as a month. Be aware that the service’s policy may change and you might not be notified. Some e-mail services offer a way to set up a folder system to store e-mails. However, the most surefire way to know that you have a copy of an e-mail is to print it. Alternatively, you can open the e-mail and click on File, then click Save As. You can now decide where the e-mail should live on your computer completely independent of your e-mail service.
Q: How do I know that the person sending an e-mail is who they say they are?
A: You don’t. It’s the same as someone calling you on the phone who says they are “Bill Smith” when they are really “John Doe.” You must be cautious, as you are in any situation in life, with a stranger. Use your instincts and powers of reasoning to determine if the person you are e-mailing is sincere or an imposter. Caution prevails! Be careful not to reveal any personal information, unless you are certain of who you are talking to and their intentions.
Q: Can I make changes to an e-mail before I send it?
A: Yes. Until you click Send, you can edit your e-mail to your heart’s content. Get it just right before you decide to send it on.
Q: If I have a PC and my daughter has a Mac, can I still send her attachments?
A: Yes. It isn’t the kind of computer you have that matters with attachments. What matters is if you have the necessary software on your computer for your daughter to be able to open the attachment on her computer. For example, if you send her a spreadsheet you created in Microsoft Excel, she needs Microsoft Excel on her computer to open and view that spreadsheet.
Q: Sometimes I can’t even open an e-mail with an attachment. The computer seems to stall or says “timed out.” What does that mean?
A: Your computer is having problems because either the attachment that was sent to you is very large or your Internet connection is slow. Are you using a dial-up? If you are, you may have problems opening up larger attachments. A document, no matter how large, will almost never be as cumbersome as a photograph, music, or video sent as an attachment.
