Chapter 10: E-mail

Ah, e-mail: Fount of a thousand wonders, bearer of joyous tidings, builder of careers.

And also the source of a million frustrations, setup for humiliations, ender of relationships.

There’d be a lot more of the good stuff, and less of the bad stuff, if everybody knew what you’re about to know about the art and science of e-mail.

The 10-minute e-mail address

Often, when you sign up for a new Web site account, the site says: “We’ve sent an e-mail to the address you’ve supplied. Your account will not be active until you click the verification link in that message.”

And sure enough: In a little while, a message like this appears in your e-mail:

The purpose of that exercise is to confirm that you are you—that you really did want to sign up. Without that verification, some prankster could sign you up for things—you know, the “Hot Fridge Repairman Photo of the Day” newsletter—without your knowledge.

Unfortunately, as you know (don’t you?), it’s foolish to supply your actual, primary e-mail address on the Web. Providing your real address is just asking to land on the mailing lists of spammers (see here).

Here’s a handy workaround: Use a temporary e-mail address. Go to www.10minute-mail.com. There, staring you in the face, is an e-mail address that’s been generated just for you, right now.

Use that as your e-mail address. Any verification messages sent to that address appear right here, on this Web site. You can “click to verify” right there—and no spammer will ever get your real e-mail address.

How to confirm a juicy e-mail item before you pass it on

If you have an e-mail account, then you must also receive the occasional eyebrow-raising story, passed along to you by some relative or well-meaning friend.

The world is full of these stories: Your friend was mugged at an overseas airport and needs you to wire some money. Your cell phone number is now being sold to telemarketers. Obama’s a Muslim.

Turns out those stories—and most of the others that get passed around by e-mail—are fake. They’re great stories, all right. They go viral because they appeal to your sense of wonder, or outrage, or vengeance. But they’re generally false.

There is, however, a wonderful place to find out before you become the sucker who passes one of those notes along. It’s Snopes.com, a free site run by a husband-and-wife team in California. All they do, all day long, is research these things that get passed around—and report on their veracity. It’s the world’s clearinghouse for Internet scams and rumors.

How to quote back (or forward) only an excerpt

When you want to respond to one point in someone’s e-mail, drag through the text in question before you click Reply. Like this:

Now, when you click Reply, your e-mail program gracefully “quotes back” only that portion of the original note. You can type your response directly beneath it, so that your correspondent knows what you’re talking about.

Everybody’s clear, and you look like a pro.

Send photos that won’t bounce back

It’s a bummer, but it’s true: Full-size photos are too big to e-mail.

Digital photos from a camera are enormous. They contain millions of pixels (tiny color dots), because they’re intended for printing. And you need a lot more dots for a printout than you do for looking at a picture on a screen. Like five times more.

Unfortunately, there’s a size limit for e-mail attachments. It depends on which e-mail service your recipient uses, but 10 megabytes is a typical limit. If you exceed that limit with your attachments, your e-mail will bounce back to you, and your intended recipient will never even know you made the attempt.

The world’s software nerds have come up with all sorts of different methods to help you get around this problem. Here are a few:

• Use the Mac’s Mail program. In OS X Yosemite, Apple has cleverly solved the attachment-size problem. If you send something big, your recipient sees a link that, when clicked, downloads your full-size originals. Even if they’re 5 gigabytes big.

• Use the E-mail command in the Pictures folder. If your PC runs Windows 7 or Windows 8, life is easy. Click the photo you want to send. (To send several, Ctrl-click them.) Then, on the Windows 7 toolbar, click E-mail; in Windows 8, open the Share menu and choose E-mail, as shown on the following page:

   Either way, Windows now offers to shrink down your pictures to e-mailable size. From the pop-up menu, choose Medium or Large. The dialog box tells you how big the resulting package will be; note that 10 MB (megabytes) is usually the most you can attach to an e-mail message.

   When you click Attach, Windows opens an outgoing e-mail message—with the scaled-down photos already attached.

• Use your photo program’s Send E-mail command. If you use a program on your computer to manage your photos—like iPhoto (Mac) or Picasa (Mac or Windows)—you’re all set. These programs offer E-mail buttons that shrink the photos and attach them to an outgoing e-mail message.

   In iPhoto, for example, select the photos, click the Share button, then click E-mail.

• Put the photos into Dropbox. If you’ve signed up for the free Dropbox service (here)—and you should—your problems are over. You can put your photos into a folder inside your Dropbox folder at full size—and then share that folder electronically with other people.

   This method sends them the full-size photos, suitable for printing or anything, by bypassing e-mail altogether.

• Just post them on the Web. Finally, consider why you’re trying to e-mail photos. If it’s so your mom or your kid or your friends can see them, wouldn’t it be easier to post them in a gallery on the Web?

   If you have a Flickr.com account, for example, you can specify exactly who gets to see your photos, even if that’s just one person; the same is true for Facebook.

   Posting your photos is a great way of creating online albums and controlling who gets to see them.

The peril and promise of BCC

When you address an e-mail message, you’re offered a “To:” box, in which you enter an e-mail address. You’re also offered a “Cc:” box, in which you can enter an e-mail address of someone else who might be interested (but who isn’t the main recipient). It stands for “Carbon copy.”

Your e-mail program also offers a third address box, labeled “Bcc.” It stands for “Blind carbon copy.” (In many e-mail programs, this box comes hidden; you have to click some button or setting to reveal it.)

Bcc lets you send a copy of a message to somebody secretly; none of the other recipients knows. Everyone sees the addresses in the “To:” and “Cc:” boxes, but nobody can see who’s getting Bcc copies.

People send Bcc copies when they want to tip off a third party. For example, if you send your boss a message that says, “Hi boss—I’ve doctored our financial books according to your instructions,” you could Bcc the FBI to clue it in without getting into trouble with your boss.

The Bcc also is useful when you want to send a message (like a joke) to a lot of people. If you put everyone’s address into the Bcc box, no one will have to scroll through a long, ugly, privacy-invading list of e-mail addresses to get to the message part.

What *this* means online

Ever wonder why some people put asterisks around words online, *like this*?

In the olden days, people couldn’t use italics in e-mail, like this. So in those dark days, *asterisks* were the e-mail version of emphasis.

Some people still use that notation out of habit. Some people use that notation because they send “plain-text” e-mail (no formatting allowed). And some people still use that notation on online services like Twitter and Facebook, because those still don’t let you use bold and italics. (Same for phone text messages, by the way.)

The non-teenager’s guide to texting shorthand

It all started with early cell phones. Back in those ancient days, typing was tedious and miserable; you had to tap out your messages on a numbered dialing pad. No wonder the world quickly adopted shorthand phrases.

The funny thing is, though, people still use them today. And not just on phones. These abbreviations crop up in e-mail messages, chat rooms, discussion sites, and—yes—even school writing assignments.

Nobody ever sits down and teaches you what they stand for, though—so let this page be your gentle tutor.

?		I don’t understand what you’re saying.
.02		That’s my two cents’ worth.
<3		I love you. (It’s a heart sideways.)
brb		Be right back!
btw		By the way …
cya		See you!
ftw		For the win! (Meaning, “That’s the BEST!”)
fwiw		For what it’s worth
gtg		Got to go
idk		I don’t know.
iirc		If I recall correctly…
imho		In my humble opinion
irl		In real life
jk		Just kidding
kk		OK
lol		Laughing out loud
meh		I feel so-so about that
noob		Newbie (beginner)
np		No problem
nvm		Never mind.
otoh		On the other hand
rofl		Rolling on the floor laughing
rtfm		Read the [freaking] manual!
sup		What’s up?
ttyl		Talk to you later
uok		Are you OK?
wrt		With regards to
wtf		What the [heck]!?
wtg		Way to go!
ymmv		Your mileage may vary.

Two quick ways of attaching a file to an outgoing message

When you want to attach a file to an e-mail you’re sending, you might instinctively click the little paper-clip icon. But there might be an easier way.

You can drag a file—or even several—right off the desktop and into the outgoing e-mail window, like this:

That trick involves positioning your e-mail window so that you can see the desktop, of course.

If you’re already at the desktop, another method awaits: the right-click method.

• Windows: Right-click the icon you want to attach. From the shortcut menu, choose “Send to”; from the shortcut menu, choose “E-mail recipient.”

• Mac: Right-click the icon you want to attach (here). From the shortcut menu, choose Share; from the shortcut menu, choose E-mail, as shown on the facing page.

(These tricks work only if you do your e-mail in a program, like Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or Apple Mail. These shortcuts don’t work if you do e-mail on a Web site, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or Outlook.com.)

How not to lose attached files

When someone sends you a file attached to an e-mail, you’ll know it. The traditional paper-clip icon appears along with the file’s name.

As you know from here, you should never open an attachment from a stranger, and never open one from someone you do know unless you are expecting it.

Here’s something else to worry about, though: losing the attachment into the bowels of your computer’s folder system.

You can double-click the file’s icon to open it, look at it, and even edit it. But at that point, the real file is still embedded in your behind-the-scenes e-mail stash. It hasn’t been freed and released into the visible realm of your own desktop and folders. To do that, you must do one of these things:

• Double-click the attachment’s name or icon. It opens right up in Word, Excel, or whatever. Now click the File menu and choose Save As; choose a location for it.

• Drag the file’s icon out of the e-mail window (or Web-browser window) and onto any visible part of your desktop behind it.

• If you use an e-mail program, like Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or Apple Mail, you can right-click the attachment’s name and, from the shortcut menu, choose “Save as.” (In Apple Mail, it’s called Save to Downloads Folder.)

   In Mail on the Mac, you may find it easier to click the little attachment menu shown here—and choose Save All.

Any of these options takes the file out of the Mail world and into your standard Windows or Mac world, where you can file it, trash it, open it, or manipulate it as you would any file.