By Rich Eichacker
Vibrance Technology Corporation
Email has become one of the most important communication tools we have today. It's fast, convenient, and allows for succinct communication. In this article, I'd like to suggest ways to use email more effectively.
Formatting. Some email programs al-low you to format your messages
much like a word processor, with fonts, bullets and lists. Unfortunately, support for this feature is not widespread and some receivers may get a text-only message with no formatting. Typically, you can
include formatting when the sender and the receiver have the same email program, such as Outlook.
Attachments. Attachments enable you to send files (documents) as well as messages. In fact, any file on your computer can be sent as an attachment and any number of files can be attached to the message. The recipient "detaches" the files and saves them on their hard drive. Attachments, like formatting, are handled differently by email pro-grams. Almost all programs can handle a single-file attachment, but multiple attachments can cause problems. The best way to send multiple attachments is to compress them into one file and then send the compressed file. The recipient saves the single, compressed file and then extracts the documents in-side. Compression also reduces the time and size required to send large documents; most documents compress by over 50%. A compression utility called WinZip is available at www.winzip.com.
Cleanup. Email messages, especially those with attachments, can consume large amounts of disk space. I've seen users with hundreds of messages in their Deleted or Sent Items folders. It's best to delete these old messages and then, if applicable, compact your email folders. Without compacting, the messages will be gone but the folder size won't decrease.
Organize. There are a number of ways to better organize your collection of email messages. I recommend keeping only new or important messages in your InBox and moving any other messages to different email folders. You can also save email messages directly to your hard drive by saving, or dragging, them to a folder. For example, if you have a separate folder for each client, create a correspondence folder under the client and save all related emails there. To open a saved email, just double-click on it and it will open in your default email package.
In a future article, I'll discuss ways to deal with spam and other junk email messages that may be filling your inbox.
Winter 2001 - Volume 11, Number 1