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The power of email
ELECTRONIC mail is truly a killer app of the internet. It attracts everybody. Millions of net users, with a range of interests, experience the power of email in every day life.
All emails really amount to be a part of persona of their senders revealing so much more than they usually care to think. Every time an email is sent, sender shares parts of his personality with the recipient, other person on the receiving end. Sender’s knowledge of the web or email clients, formatting and choice of stationary, subject lines, graphics, contents, and signature files add power to the email and point out to the personality who created it.
First there are impulsive personalities; those who tend to fire off mails spontaneously. These spontaneous “users are likely to put down something that comes readily to their mind,” says a sociologist, Dr Muhammad Anwar.
He adds, “In this sense, emails tap into things that are just below the surface of consciousness. They produce more emails that are usually sloppy and abrupt.”
Taking pride in mail counts (how many emails I get in my inboxes), and in an effort to increase the count, these users register everywhere they originate chain-mail without thinking about consequences. They forward to others on their address lists whatever they find in their inboxes without bothering to strip extraneous info and irritating characters from the chain emails.
Another user group comprises those who ponder long and hard before hitting the Send button. The majority among this group may not be particularly computer-literate but has incorporated emailing into everyday life.
Yet another group is of techies — typically computer savvy. Apart from typos, they do not bother with capitalization and/or punctuation or language consideration such as vowels and nouns.
Email personality is a combination of style, tone, content and attitude. When recipients click away from the email, they leave it with a clear view of the email and the person (or concern) associated with it. Subsequent emails either reinforce that impression or change it.
Letter writing is still a compulsory part of English as well as Urdu composition in schools and business communication is taught in different courses at higher levels here and elsewhere. But the first causality in case of email has been salutations and format: Instead of starting a formal email with use of an appropriate title or personal email as per the nature and depth of relationship with the addressee, most emails start with hi or worst still without any beginning. Same is the case with endings. Similarly emails are hardly ever formatted properly though most email programs provide for it.
Resmi Shaji is a freelance writer based in Kerala, India and gets an awful lot of emails. Resmi has researched and written about the best email practices. She says, “Contents should be carefully fabricated. What you write reveals the person you are. Applying varied colours to fonts or experimenting with fonts like ‘CityBluePrint’ will not attract the reader. It might even turn off the person on the other side though sender may be trying to look creative.”
Although the use of email is largely behavioural rather than technological, yet knowing a thing or two about email program may facilitate the senders a great deal. As per the observations, two of the least utilised features of email programs are carbon copy fields and signature files. For the most part people are seen using “To” field and or “CC” (Carbon Copy) field for emailing to any number of beneficiaries in a single message informing every one about all others to whom the message have been sent and revealing their email addresses — fodder for email address harvesters. Using the “BCC” (Blind Carbon Copy) Field instead can solve the problem because it hides the email addresses of other people to whom email has been sent. Users can even leave the “To” Field blank or put own email address there.
Similarly, email signature files are used very aptly by some users but this useful feature is not very popular among common users. Signatures can appear at the bottom of each email. It is like leaving a visiting card in an inbox of the recipient; convenient and trendy. Signatures are easy to change, can be created and customized as and when required. Wisely crafted, they can speak loud about anything senders want others to know and add individuality. It will be good to see, by sending an email to own address, how signature will look like at the bottom of the message before practicing.
Users act differently in case of emails that bounce back undelivered. Some keep repeating the mail without trying to know the cause of the bouncer.
Zahid Shahzad, a techie, says, “This is due to the lack of knowledge about temporary and permanent email bounces.” A temporary bounce is an email that reaches as far as the recipient’s mail server (it recognizes the address) but rebounds undelivered before it gets to the intended addressee. It may be due to overloaded mailbox of the recipient, the server maybe down or flooded with messages, the message is too large or the user has abandoned the mailbox. Most email service providers keep attempting to deliver the email regularly for a few days. If it is still undelivered, it becomes a permanent bounce — an email message that has been returned to the sender and is completely undeliverable. Reasons may include invalid addresses (domain name does not exist, typos, changed address) or the email recipient’s mail server has blocked the server.
Email is here to stay. It is also coming up as literary genre, some people write very persuasive and flowing prose in their emails messages. A young and innovative writer Shafqat Abbas is working on a project to compile a book in which he intends presenting emails of literary value (remember an all time favourite Ghalib ke Khattot).
After having association with written words all my working life, I was hooked up to email when every one else in my circle was already on it. I had to. Now, given chance, I prefer to communicate through email, in first person singular mostly. Result: in response I receive a lot of emails; also some spam, petitions and requests from charities as far as in Maryland, local chain letters (Ok, the local chain emails I pass along sometime) and a lot of other “noise,” spending time weeding them out of my email inboxes. After facing barrages of electronic words for sometime as well as owning my own work on the Internet, like others, I also tend to farm an opinion about the personality of the sender every time I read an email. The fact is that email is changing how I feel about people who write them.
Email is here to stay as a medium of communication. And if email is taken as a modern day personality test, this proves at least one trait: most people are more transparent than they might care to think. Additional thoughts, some knowledge and usual courtesies could make email experience more productive and recipients much happier.
The writer
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