E-Mail Privacy and Security are at Risk – 8 Tips on E-Mail Security to Protect Yourself and Your Contacts*
For people of all ages, these points of skill and etiquette are logical and easy. Your friends and contacts will love you for preserving their privacy too.
L'espace internet du musee de la communication, (Berlin), photo by dalbera
Teach your kids and parents how to make E-mailing safer and better.
Security tips first, then points of etiquette. Each tip is explained in greater detail in the second half of this post.
- Make the SUBJECT line relevant for every E-mail. URGENT!!! is not relevant.
- Be cautious using “TO” for batch messages to people who do not all know each each other.
- Get into the habit of composing more important messages in DRAFT.
- REPLY ALL and COPY ALL are buttons that are easy to hit by mistake.
- Review and edit the trail of previous messages. Or start fresh.
- Your E-contacts may have different programs, systems and E-skills. Make it easy for them to get your message and attachments.
- Learn how to reduce the resolution of photos for quicker downloading times.
- Begin and end each message properly. Have a few different “auto signatures”.
Part 2 – detailed explanations:
1. A missing or cryptic Subject line is a warning light for spam. Take the pressure off your E-mail correspondents by choosing a Subject line that clearly indicates what’s in your message. Many people automatically delete E-mail with dubious subjects such as Hi!!, IMPORTANT!! and “re: your message”. You want your contacts to get and read your mail.
2. Do you want everyone to have full (and free) access to your valuable and private mailing list? Unknown and undesired people can troll through batches of addresses for spamming and other purposes. You could unintentionally be providing a trail of addresses broadcast on the WWW through multiple Forwards.
Sending – A contact’s E-mail address is personal information. You want your privacy too, don’t you? There are options for sending batch messages depending on who you want to reach.
Create distribution lists for different social or professional groups you correspond with. A contact can be on several different lists if interests and connections overlap.
Replying – Instead of REPLYing ALL, and then SENDing out to ALL, first select REPLY ALL, and then cut, not copy, all the addresses from the TO field and the paste them in “bcc”. If necessary, do the same if there are addresses in the original message’s “cc” field. Cut the addresses and paste them into “bcc”. Now type your own address in the TO field. You are actually sending the message to yourself and all the recipients are hidden from one another in “bcc”, blind carbon copy. (Carbon was a method used way back to duplicate correspondence using a type of copying paper.) If you don’t see “bcc” in the copy options, point your cursor to the square shaped icon beside the copy options, and most likely a drop down list of more copying choices will appear.
There’s another way to be cautious with REPLY ALL. Review the original list of names in the recipient lists and delete any names you don’t want receiving your reply.
3. Rushing to write or reply to E-mail, especially during a long session of E-mailing can result in mistakes happening. Use DRAFT when composing more important messages, then re-read each one for tone, sentence structure and spelling before sending. Even with close friends and associates, wait 2 minutes before hitting SEND. Re-read what you wrote 2 minutes ago. Remember someone you care about is reading it. Mistakes and misunderstandings do happen. If you are upset or angry, send that E-mail when you have thought about whatever it is and have all the facts.
4. When you are tired or distracted you could mistakenly hit the REPLY ALL or COPY ALL button when you don’t mean to. If you’ve made this mistake once before, you probably have already learned the hard way to pause and think twice before hitting that final button.
5. Leave only the previous 1 or 2 rounds of conversation as reference when continuing correspondence. Is the text still relevant to the original subject line? Either delete most of the foregoing messages before adding your thoughts, or begin a new message with a new Subject line.
If you are responding on a group E-mail topic and you only want to say “I agree”, you could create a new message: using copy and paste, quote only the relevant section from the original letter. Again, review all the people in that distribution list.
6. Not all computers have the same applications and formats for opening and reading files such as Word. Not all systems are able to interpret all fonts, indents, bold lettering, centering, italics, etc. Keep messages simple by using basic text formats. Otherwise, your recipients could be missing parts of your E-mail. Arial and Times are the most commonly available fonts. Don’t use ENTER or RETURN at the end of lines. This way the text will automatically adjust to the window size of the recipient. Save people time and effort by Sending or Forwarding messages containing attachments in a format the attachments are easy to open and read. The most common formats for text attachments are Word and PDF. JPG is most common for photos. Newer versions of WORD can also cause problems with recipients that still have older versions on their computers. You can save WORD files as RTF which is much more universal.
7. Get a simple photo management program. Some are available free to download. Or you can use Microsoft Photo Editor for Windows, and Apple Preview for MAC OSX. Suggested size of photos for E-mail are no more than 200 px (pixels) on the larger dimension. The command is usually “resize image” under the TOOLS/IMAGE drop down menus. To save a photo for posting on the WWW, the command is under SAVE: Name the photo. You can choose the jpeg. mode and reduce the resolution further to less than 50. Save the photo to a place you can easily find it, such as Desktop.
8. Be polite, even with close friends. Begin with a greeting, or as a minimum the person’s name. Create a variety of “auto signatures” and take 2 seconds to personalize each E-mail. For an organization or company signature, list your full name, your affiliation to the company or organization, phone, fax and E-mail address.
These are practical suggestions. Working together, everyone can help improve the quality of correspondence in cyberspace. Journalism on the WWW sure could use improvements starting with the basics of truth and integrity.
* This post is part of a series of articles intended to help my readers improve their Internet Skills.
