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Didn't you get my email?This is part I of two parts. The second section will be posted in a few days. I sent my printer an email containing an order a few weeks ago. I never heard from him, but he can go for more than a few days without returning phone calls or messages. But he always does...eventually. So I wasn't worried. Well, the due date for another print job was coming up, so I gave him a call. He never got my email message. I had since decided to hold off on that particular project, so I suggested he never mind. He subsequently checked with his ISP (dolts who shall remain nameless) who "found" about 35 messages that he never received. Mine was one of them. Because the ISP screwed up, my printer lost some business. And I, frankly, got a reprieve. But you see, I'm smart. I already knew the message that I'm about to impart to you. And that little bit of wisdom for you, gentle reader, is that email is unreliable and you should never assume that, just because you clicked on "send" and no error message comes back, that your message was received. I received a message a couple of weeks ago. It was garbled. I don't mean just a little garbled. I mean 100% Klingon encrypted. There was not one readable letter on it, including the headers. Not only could I not read it, I couldn't tell the sender that it was screwed up. But I didn't pursue it since it was probably one of the 10 or 20 spams I get every day, and I ain't gonna break a sweat over those messages. The following week, a client asked me if I had gotten the message he'd copied to me. I thought for a moment and then advised him that I hoped it wasn't important. As it turns out, it was an FYI, so no harm was done. Email can be a terrific boon to productivity. And it can be a scourge on mankind. As per my wont, I'll focus on the scourge part...it's more fun. What I'd like to do is give you some hints so that your communications are more effective. Lots of things can go wrong with email. Your email package could blow, the Internet could cough, your ISP might have problems, their ISP might have problems, their internal email system could crash or their computer might have problems. And that's just the technical stuff. There are human issues as well. When you get regular paper mail, or even faxes, you are getting an actual, readable piece of paper. Unless that piece of paper gets misfiled, it's there, somewhere on your correspondent's desk, waiting for him or her to deal with it. They may throw it away, but they might at least glance at it on its way to the circular file. But with email, you don't have any of that physical mass. Your message is nothing but another entry on a list of maybe tens or hundreds of messages, depending on how busy they are, how many email lists they're on, how long they've been on vacation or how much spam they receive. So your message is fighting with lots of other messages, some legitimate and some not so desired. If your friend has to wade through 150 messages in a day, what are the odds that they're going to even see your message, let alone read it carefully? Bear in mind that people are very busy. Email is fast becoming a chore that most would rather not deal with. You're not helping any by sending them another one. Another problem is multiple email addresses. Many people now have more than one addresses (I have 3 that I check regularly), including many that are still active, but they don't check (I have about 5 of those). They might have addresses for work, home, and online forums. If they've been on the Internet for a couple of years, they probably have at least one old address from an ISP that they're not using anymore. Maybe they've changed jobs recently. At least with regular mail, they're likely to have only two addresses - home and work. And unless they store their worldly possessions on a bicycle, the home address is probably pretty stable. And the Postal Service will forward it, or at least let you know it didn't get through. So how do you make sure your email message gets the attention and respect that it deserves? 1. The best thing you can do is ask your correspondent to reply to the message. Some mail packages allow you to ask for a return receipt. I don't recommend that because it isn't an assurance that they've READ the message...just that their computer displayed it. It's not the same thing. In the body of the text, ask them to respond to your email, maybe even asking them to acknowledge that they understand the important parts. Don't abuse this. Don't rush out and add "please respond that you've read and understood this message" to your signature file. Don't demand acknowledgments on every email you send. You'll really tick people off and they'll just ignore you. Use it for those really important messages. Part
II
will continue in a few days.
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