+++
title = "these emails, what a mystery :)"
author = "Danilo M."
type = "life"
date = "2010-11-06T22:28:43+00:00"
excerpt = "small steps to follow when sending an email."
draft = true
categories = [ "Blogging"]
tags = ["attachments", "email", "howto", "mistakes", "privacy", "subject"]
+++

I was inspired by a funny, yet sadly realistic, [article published][1] on [Barbara Sgarzi's blog][2], a journalist I wasn't familiar with but will definitely start following, to talk about a communication medium that is widely used but unfortunately often underestimated: **emails**.

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{{< image src="/uploads/2010/11/email-at1-300x211.gif" alt="Email at symbol illustration" >}}{{< /image >}}
I can already imagine, you, my loyal (3) readers, being ready to say: "_But what could you possibly teach us about emails that we don't already know?_" Well, let's start with the first thing that catches the eye of someone receiving an email: the **subject line**.

Yes, it's called the subject line because it's meant to describe what the email is about, the subject of the message. Therefore, it makes no sense to leave the field blank or write meaningless things like "email from so-and-so," "communication from such-and-such," etc. If you want to know who the sender is, there's the "From:" or "Da:" field, or guess what, "Sender:," would you have ever guessed?! :)

Another rather unpleasant thing to see is an empty message body with all the content relegated to the attachments. If I receive an email like that, I'm not rushing to read the attachment; instead, I delete it directly! Attachments are meant to attach something that cannot be put in the message body, not to contain the message!

Another problem that often plagues those who receive emails is the sending of photos! We could spend rivers of words on this point, talking about the fact that nowadays, with the super-fast ADSL connections we have, receiving large attachments is no longer a problem, but I don't understand why I should have to download a 12-megapixel photo at 300 {{< acronym title="dot per inches (punti per pollice)" >}}dpi{{< /acronym >}} if I'm not even going to print it, but at most share it on the blog or on Facebook; take a little bit of your ~~precious~~ time and reduce the size of the photos you send. Reducing the resolution from 300 to 72 [dpi][4] will significantly help those who receive the email and also save you a lot of time in sending. Another note regarding the size of the photos, if you are sending a photo of a cute puppy that will be used as a background for the beloved's baby, what's the point of it measuring 4000 pixels on the short side?! A decent resolution could be 1600 pixels on the long side and the short side sized proportionally. In this way, the dimensions will decrease further without losing the quality of your wonderful shot! ;)

{{< image src="/uploads/2010/11/url-300x197.jpg" alt="URL structure illustration" >}}{{< /image >}}
[5] The next point in this series could have its own title and article, "_how to send links. The correct way to share those infamous [URLs][6]_"; since the dawn of the internet, there has been a need to share interesting links with our contacts, and especially in recent times, links have become longer and more complex, such as:

```
http://www.example.net/test/sample_page.php?variable00=aldsgfqeworslkdf2934523&variable01=abbecceddario&variable02=tomorrow+will+rain#bookmark539
```

And even though I understand that sharing links is essential, I just can't conceive of the fact that those who send links don't bother to check that they are at least working before sending the email. Copy and paste is a wonderful invention, but why make a fool of yourselves (to say the least) by sending long links broken into 20 parts, which take more time to reconstruct than reading the rest of the mail, with the risk that you forget a tiny character like a period and the link doesn't work?! To avoid this type of inconvenience, you can pay more attention by rereading the email before sending it, or you can use one of the many URL shortening services available on the web, ~~such as [uri.danixland.net][7]~~. In this way, the links will become much shorter and easier to manage, and you will avoid many problems for those who read the emails!

Another piece of advice: **recheck what you have written**, no, seriously, would you ever hand in an assignment without even rereading it? So why, before sending an email that probably took you less time to write, don't you give it a quick reread?! Emails with a subject line but no text, or those with the text "_Attachment ready for shipping_," but without the attachment, are fantastic. Come on, what does it take to take a moment to focus on what you're doing?!

Finally, I'll leave you with probably the mother of all bad behaviors when sending an email: disrespect for privacy! What am I talking about? Are you familiar with those wonderful St. Anthony's chains that are so popular during the holidays? Those with tear-jerking PowerPoint presentations attached that "_if you don't forward them to 140 friends within the next 7 minutes, you have no heart and your cat will die choking on a goldfish while falling on the dog, which will break its leg, and the bird, sad about it, will stop eating and die?_" Well, those chains are the paradise of spammers. Receiving one of those emails is like receiving a gift of the entire list of your friends on Facebook multiplied by all the friends of each individual friend. Sometimes, the email address lists are longer than the body of the message itself. This happens probably because you are not familiar with the communication medium you are using. The "To:" field should contain the recipient of the email, and that's obvious, but how to behave when there are multiple recipients? That's where the "[Bcc:][8]" field, also known as "{{< acronym title="Copia carbone nascosta" >}}Ccn:{{< /acronym >}}," comes to the rescue. This field is used to insert the secondary recipients of the email and ensure that their address is not visible to the main recipients specified in the "To:" field. When there are many recipients and not all of them know each other, it is good practice to avoid making email addresses visible to avoid someone accusing you of violating privacy! I am often tempted to report those who send emails of this kind :/

I think I've exhausted the topics regarding emails. I hope to receive many communications from you, and I hope you will treasure what I have advised you, otherwise you can save yourself the time of writing to me, because I will probably never read what you send me ;)

I'll leave you again with the link from which I drew to write this article. Take a look at it, as well as the rest of the blog. It's well-written and I found it quite interesting. [http://uri.danixland.net/e](2)

[1]: http://uri.danixland.net/e "decalogue for the press offices - blimunda.net"
[2]: http://uri.danixland.net/d "The blog of blimunda"
[3]: /uploads/2010/11/email-at11.gif
[4]: http://uri.danixland.net/f "points per inch - wikipedia"
[5]: /uploads/2010/11/url1.jpg
[6]: http://uri.danixland.net/g "uniform resource locator - wikipedia"
[7]: http://uri.danixland.net "URL shortening made in danixland"
[8]: http://uri.danixland.net/h "Blind carbon copy - wikipedia"