We ended last time talking about sending email using the HTML format. Sure, you have more control over formatting (colorful, bold text and pretty pictures) than with plain text email, but there’s a price to be paid. Those attached image files and all that extra code (code that you or your reader never see, but it’s there, in, the background) add at least a few kilobytes (KB) to every message. With gazillions of messages traveling the internet every day, and people replying, forwarding, etc., that becomes a lot of KBs that have to be pushed around. Why bother? I’m sure there are some “special announcement” emails that you may want to “spruce up” a bit, but do you really need large, bold, pink text and a fashionable left margin border image for a simple reply “Yes” to an emailed dinner invitation? My answer? No, you don’t.

Now, what if that emailed dinner invitation was created in stylish, fashionable HTML format, and all you want to do is reply, without sending back all those extra KBs? Simple. Most email applications have a button to click, or a pull-down menu option to select, to almost instantly turn a bloated HTML email into a lean, plain text email.

What else can you do to keep email bloat to a minimum? You can avoid some of the “cutesy” features now common in many email applications. For example, there’s that option you can choose, when replying to an email, to have a line inserted at the top of the body of the message, that says something like, “At 10:02 PM, on Monday, September 22nd, Joe Schmoe, with great aplomb, did scribe…”. Waste of KBs, if you ask me. Or, how about that “signature” feature, where you can designate some witty (in YOUR mind, anyway) quote or anecdote, to be automatically inserted at the end of your message. These may seem trivial, but when that bloated message starts getting forwarded and bounced around, the real meat of the message can become hard to find.

There are several ways to address emails. Obviously, you can send an email to many people at once by placing all their addresses in the “To” field of your message. You can also send an email to one person, and a copy to other recipients, placing their addresses in the “CC” (or Copy) field. However, in both these cases, everyone who receives the email can easily see everyone else who received it, and you may not want that. In fact, many people don’t like having their address sent out to a bunch of people they don’t know. How can you avoid this? Use the “BCC” (or Blind Copy) field. If you use this method, none of the recipients see any of the other recipient’s email addresses. However, to us this feature, you must put someone’s address in the “To” field. When I use this feature, I put my email address in the “To” field, and all the other recipients in the “BCC” field.

While we’re on the subject of addresses, many Internet Service Providers and email services restrict the number of recipients you can send a single email to, to keep spammers off their service. Ask your ISP what, if any, restrictions they have, before you try to send out that Christmas newsletter to all three hundred people on your Christmas card list. The solution? Send a series of separate emails, with each sent to a “legal” number of recipients.

Finally, clean out your mailboxes occasionally. There are programs that will archive your email to text files, which take up less space and are still searchable.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski