Communicating on the Web

Ah yes, more tutes to document...

• What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?

The senders name, email address (of course), email account username, the domain the email account it's hosted at (often it is also the domain for a website), the country the domain is hosted in (.au), the type of domain as in whether it is an organisation (.org), company (.com) etc.

Other information that can be gleamed includes other recipients of the email, if it has been forwarded, the past senders of the email (in the body of the email), time and date the email was sent, and if the sender has a signature attached to the email, pretty much everything about the person including phone number, address, place of work, etc!

• In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all functions of email?

'CC' stands for Carbon Copy ('BCC' being Blind Carbon Copy). The term was coined in the early days of printing when a carbon based paper was used to create an identical copy of a document that had been created without having to retype it.

In regards to emails, essentially it allows the sender of the email to add additional recipients to an email. The same objective can be achieved by adding such recipients to the 'To' field, but the discrepancy is that if the email is not necessarily addressed to the recipient, it is better practice to add them to CC. It notifies all the recipients that those added to CC are being sent the email for refernece purposes.

BCC on the other hand, is similar to CC although no one knows that the email has been sent to them. It is a great way to address an email to a lot of people without everyones email address being visible to all recipients. Newsletters for example can benefit as each email may be sent to thousands of recipients and they don't neccessarily want to have to see thousands of email addresses on their newsletter!

• In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?

There are a couple of methods. Using a universally accepted format such as .txt, .rtf, .htm/l for documents and internet standard image formats such as .jpg, .gif, .png (also helps to keep attachments small in size too).

Also, using a program to zip the files to a .zip or .rar format will ensure that the files sent are small in size, and won't be blocked my email filters.

On a more obsure note, keeping the name of the file simple and oppropriate will stop attachments from being blocked, but will also let the recipient know what the file contains.

• What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?

Several. Spam filters to prevent spam getting through to my inbox, forwarding rules so that all my different email accounts will send a copy of all emails recieved to my main email account that i check often, saving time and easing the hastle of checking them all individually.

Others include rules that automatically send emails to certain folders in my inbox that are either from certain senders, or have certain titles (regular newsletters etc) and filters that block pesky senders.

• How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?

As i often receive a lot of email daily, I have a few folders that are based on categories. eg, a folder for work related stuff, a folder for newsletters, a folder that contains emails from my girlfriend, etc.

It helps to break up all the emails into types so that i don't need to sift through hundreds of emails for the one I need or filter the list by name, date etc.