Emails To Me

The odds are high that you don't have a clue what it is like to deal with 300-500 email messages each and every single day as I do. Please understand that, from this perspective, things start to look a bit different when 80% of the mail is incorrectly addressed, mis-formatted, or needlessly inconvenient.

How To Make Me Happy By Sending Smart EMails

In order to communicate effectively with me through email, you are kindly asked to follow this wishlist. If you don't, it will essentially delay the work on your email.

Use a meaningful Subject: header

• My inboxes have currently more than 10000 messages. I am searching that mostly by subject. If your message does not carry a meaningful subject line, it's fate is clear. It will simply drown under the next 300-500 messages within 24 hours if I'm not getting around to deal with it right away.


• One topic per message is preferred. This makes it easier for you to select meaningful subject lines and, perhaps more importantly, to forward/file/delete things and keep what's relevant.

Message formatting and encoding

• Preferred format is text/plain. It's simple. It works. It works even better if you stick to the convention to pre-format your message to a line width something around 72 columns.


• Please DO restrict your line length to something around 72 characters. It's much better readable, it's much easier to reply to it.


• And yes: It's YOUR job to come up with a legible message in the first place. Don't expect all the readers to do the formatting you forgot. Read HOWTO Edit Messages if you haven't already.


• You can rely upon me using a constant width font and standard tabs (which means: every 8th column).



• Text encoding ASCII 7 bit is just fine. Don't bother with Umlauts beyond their simple two-letter "ae" etc. approximation. If you do, I actually prefer 8bit/iso-latin-1 encodings to "quoted printable".


• Definitely no Umlauts anywhere in the header. This refers mostly to the Subject: and your address. (These fields are usually rendered as-is in summaries and if you don't want me to be able to search for your
  Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Anfrage=3AM=F6glichkeit_f=FCr_eine_Softwarel=F6?=sung
  then this is your problem, not mine.



• No HTML, please. I won't see a nice rendition of it. For a start, no fonts or no colors here through my remote shell.


• No multipart/alternate text/plain+text/html, please. The HTML is just wasted. Stakes are high that your mail will be catched by my spam checker (and thus be deleted unread).

Attachments

• No attachments, please. Well, perhaps for the odd small file. Definitely no big attachments! I *always* prefer an URL to some FTP or WWW host to retrieve the document myself. In most cases that document is destined for some other host than my mail machine, anyway.


• I am not using Microsoft Word or other "common" Office Tools. I'm usually not even using Windows. Do not send me Word (TM) documents or Excel(TM) spreadsheets.

Authentication and encryption

• You can exchange signed and/or encrypted mails with me using PGP/GPG. I do not use the X.500 PKI as integrated, say, in Netscape's Messenger. Please see my PGP page for details.


• My public communication key is this one and is already registered with the pgp.net key server network. Small public endorsement: I do trust the escape e.V. Certification Authority. I convinced myself that they stick to thorough procedures. Most important, they are competent enough to ensure to know what they are actually doing, not just some droids which are easily betrayed.

Content

• Be specific. Don't just write "We have to fix that CGI script for orders." Please write instead: "We have to fix that CGI script for orders reachable via http://www.foo.com/bar/order.html". Don't let me guess what you are talking about or search for it needlessly. It usually takes you five seconds to add that URL. It takes me 20 minutes to search at the wrong place -- 20 minutes you would be billed for, if this was contract work I did for you. Otherwise I simply might have given up and perhaps sent you a message to be more specific.

Why all that?

In order to be able to read and work on my/your email from anywhere, I restrict myself to absolutely portable (read: stone-aged) mail interfaces.

If you absolutely need to know: I usually use mutt through a secure shell remote session. This works at the office, at home, and abroad. It works through firewalls, it works on a dinky palm. Yes, I used elm/mailx/pine/netscape-messenger before. mutt does the things I need, protects me from virii, allows me to spec the header lines, allows me to know reliably what I send, complies with MIME, has fully transparent PGP/MIME support, and lets me filter messages and sets of messages through Unix programs. Let me know when Netscape Messenger is up to these things.