Email Tutorial Tips
People like what framcom provides but they don't always have the proficiency at using email the way that they'd like to have. This is an attempt to get people more comfortable with the basic concepts of how to use email. I have no idea what mailer you're using and I couldn't possibly write anything that was mailer specific. Once I get the basics in, people are more than welcome to add tips for specific mailers.
I'm organizing this tutorial into a tree of possibilities of how you use your mail program. You can tell where you are in the tree by looking at the section numbers.
When you start your mail, you're given two possible options. The choices are to read your mail or to write a new message.
1. Writing your mail. That's it. What you write may be a big deal but as far as mail functionality goes, there's not much to it. Fill in the To field. Fill in the Subject field. If it makes sense then add one or more people to the Cc field. If you want someone to see your mail and you don't want the people on the To or Cc fields to know that Mr. Someone got a copy then just add him to the Bcc field.
You really should be somewhat smart about how you use the Subject field. For example, don't say Hi. In fact, most spamfilters will just discard a pleasant Hi. If you're asking for help on how to run the fratzlever, then don't say "Help" in the Subject line when you could say "Need help with use of fratzlever".
2. Reading your mail. That's it. Read your mail. Afterwards, you have the option of deleting it, but that's really all there is to it. But now it gets fun.
After you read it, if you didn't delete it, you can reply, forward, or sometimes even bounce your mail.
2.1 Replying to your mail. Typically, you can either Reply or ReplyToAll. Usually you get a choice of how you want to do it. Either way, you are the person in charge. You have the ability to add or delete people from the To or Cc lines and you can add people to the Bcc line if you want. It's your mail. Just don't send stuff out without knowing that the mail that gets sent is sent by you and is under your full control.
When you send a message out, you hardly ever want to change the Subject line. If there's a converstation going on and the topic has truly changed, you might want to change it, but do it with care. For example, if the Subject was "Looking for a dog" and somehow people have started talking about poodles, then you could conceivable change the Subject to "Poodles: Was: Looking for a dog".
One thing you never want to do is to try to start a new message by replying to an old message and then changing the Subject and the entire body of the message. The reason for this is that most mailers know how to organize the mail in Thread order. Thread order is different from Subject order because Subject order sorts your mail alphabetically by Subject but within a subject, the messages are sorted in cronological order. In Thread order, the messages are sorted with respect to who replied to what. So if you write a new message by replying to an old one, you will mess up everyone's index of messages.
Frambors specific note: Some mailers are broken such that a Reply function will try to reply to the hidden Sender header instead of to the person in the From header. If you have one of those broken mailers, you need to make sure to change the To field to be correct. e.g., if you reply to a frambors message From: Betty Boop < betty@boop.com > and the Reply would try to send to frambors-owner@syzlang.net then you need to change the To field. Otherwise the message would only go to the owner of the list and not to Betty.
2.2 Forwarding your mail. Sometimes you want to take a message and send it to one or more people. That's when you forward it. You can add your text and you can trim down the full text of what you're forwarding. You're in control. And again, you are the owner of the To, CC and Bcc lines.
2.3 Bouncing your mail. Not everyone has this function. If you don't then just ignore this. If I get a message from someone, I can bounce it to Bob. Bob will receive a message that looks like it came to him directly, except that it will have a message embedded in the header that will say that it was resent from me.
That's it.
Now a few extra tips that that can help some of us:
Tip 0. Reduce the quoted text when replying. If you have a message from Bob that's six pages long and your reply is two sentences, then it's highly likely that you're not replying to all six pages of Bob's message. Keep it all if you need it, but what you don't need it should be deleted if it's not relevant to your reply.
Tip 1.Top posting. When you reply to a message, your cursor will probably be at the top of the message and what you're replying to will be below. In many circles, placing the text of your reply is considered rude or at least disagreeable. People who are better educated will know to place their reply text at the end of the message. To learn more, look for "Top posting" on google.
Tip 2. Signature files. You can set your mailer to add a signature to the end of every message. People abuse those signatures by making them very long. How long is too long? Again, google is your friend. Just look for "signature netiquette" for scads of references on the topic. Oh, the answer is four. No signature should be longer than 4 lines. Just because others' are longer doesn't mean it's right. One last thing: Every signature should begin with a line that has exactly three characters. The first two characters should be the dash (that thing to the right of the 0) followed by a space. That sequence is actually a part of the protocol definition for how email is supposed to work. Most people's email programs will know when something is a signature and may display it differently, and forwarding or replying a message may be made easier. Here's a good write-up on what I'm talking about.
Tip 3. Most people have control over being able to configure how replies look. Just my opinion, and I'm always right, but the best way to do it is to set your mail up so that a reply would quote the previous message with a small prefix with no indentation. e.g., the original message said.
Is it raining?
The reply should say
=> Is it raining?
Shonuff is.
Tip 4. Never send a message without a Subject line. Email without a Subject line is just begging to not be read. Email without a Subject line in a mailinglist just means that more people won't read it.
Tip 5. Send plaintext. The web was intended for html. Email was intended for plaintext. Yes, lots of people use mailers that display html but when you send email to most lists (all lists here included), all of the html gets removed leaving only the plaintext. Therefore, do not complain when your markup is lost. Things like color, font, size, underlining, reverse video, blinking, emoticons, all gone. If you want emphasis you need to exercise a bit of *creativity* instead. 
Oops, I meant ;-)If this inspires you, you can read this page on '''How to disable HTML'''. Also, don't forget that all attachments are removed. So if you send a message out that says to see the attachment for further details, they'll never see it.
Example
Examples to follow
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