E-mail: An Introduction

On the whole, e-mail is a casual form of communication which is subject to far fewer rules than, say, a research paper. Still, I frequently get e-mails from my students which disregard some fairly basic expectations that English-speaking e-mail users generally have, so I decided to write this short tutorial. The first part offers guidelines on how to write a message, the second part is about the medium more generally.

One

Subject Line, Greeting Line, Closing Line, Signature

An e-mail message usually consists of a number of elements:

• Use the subject line in your mailer’s task bar for a brief and accurate description of what your message is about. A subject line such as ‘Nomikai on Friday’ is good if you want to invite the recipient to a party on Friday, whereas a subject line such as ‘from Saburo’ is bad no matter what, even if your name happens to be Saburo. Don’t sign your message in the subject line! Note that subject lines, in addition to informing the recipient at a single glance about the contents of your message, will also make it easier to find your message again in the future.
• Before you start writing the message itself, use a greeting line. A greeting line such as ‘Dear Dr. Amherst’ is appropriate for a formal message. ‘Dear Jane’ is less formal and suitable for someone with whom you are on first-name terms. ‘Hi Mark’ or ‘Hey Julia’ is appropriate for an informal message to a friend. If you do not know the recipient’s name, it’s probably better to say ‘Hello’ instead of leaving out the greeting altogether. Use a comma immediately after the greeting line, then insert a blank line, then start your message.
• At the end of your message, use a closing line, insert a blank line and then sign your name. Closing lines can be tricky to get right, but I’d recommend the the following:

  Formal: Regards, Best regards
  Semi-formal: All the best
  Informal: See you (later), Talk to you later, Later, Best,

  Instead of signing your name manually, you might want to use a signature file (also known as a ‘sig file’) which the email program inserts automatically at the end of a message. Professionals usually include the organisation for which they work and the position they hold within it, maybe with their postal address, phone number or URL (if any). Students may find it convenient to include their cell phone number in a sig file.

Message Body

• Start a new paragraph whenever you move from one thing to the next: messages that run on and on without paragraph breaks are hard and tiresome to read. You are not required to compose formal paragraphs with topic sentences, but some sort of paragraphing is nice anyway. Indenting the first lines of your paragraphs is not considered practical, so use a blank line between paragraphs instead (this is technically known as block paragraphing).

Miscellaneous Tips

• Avoid using all capital letters. USING ALL CAPS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING! This is annoying and hard to read. Some people use lower-case letters exclusively, which is generally accepted, yet I do not recommend it.
• Stick to standard written English: use chat acronyms (such as ‘u’ for ‘you’ and ‘ur’ for ‘you are’) and emoticons sparingly. Hint: there are many people out there who hate these things with a passion.
• Use attachments sparingly. Most e-mail programs allow you to send your messages with other files attached; you typically have to click on a paper clip icon and then select the file from its location in your file system. Most users are very cautious about attachments they receive and are reluctant to open them because they might contain malicious code that could damage their machines.
       If you do send an attachment, make sure it is of reasonable size. Many people still connect to the internet on slow dialup-connections that take up to a second to download a kilobyte (KB) of information. If you attach a 200 KB photograph (usually a .jpg file), this might take three minutes to download over such a connection.
• Your e-mail client allows you to forward to other people any messages you receive, practically at the click of a button. Use extreme restraint, however, in clicking on that button: most humorous offerings have made the rounds already, and people get annoyed if they receive a list of jokes for the umpteenth time. People also get easily annoyed about chain letters. And never even think about forwarding a virus warning unless you have run a google search on it or checked what anti-virus specialists such as Symantec or McAfee have to say: most of these warnings are hoaxes and you look very silly if you fall for them.
• Quote wisely. Most e-mail programs can be configured so that the message you reply to will appear in your own message, usually with each line of the original message preceded by a right-pointing angle bracket (>). It is common practice to reply above of the complete message somebody sent you; never reply below the complete message.
       Another common practice is to place your replies directly inside the body of the quoted message. Your message might thus come to look like a dialogue:

  > I hope to make it by 6 p.m.
  It’s OK if you can’t make it on time -- I might be late myself.
  
  > Are you coming by train or by car?
  Car.

  If you do this, remove everything you do not reply to and leave just enough of the original text for the recipient to understand what you are replying to.
• And finally, don’t write anything you wouldn’t say in public. Your message can easily be forwarded to third parties or even be intercepted by people who shouldn’t be reading what you wrote. This could leave you in an embarrassing position.

Two

Outside of wireless appliances such as your keitai (which use imode/WAP/Jskyweb technologies), e-mail comes in two main varieties: web-based and POP/IMAP. The infrastructure for Web-based e-mail is located entirely on your service provider’s machines (servers); you access and use it by means of a web browser. Some of the infrastructure for POP/IMAP e-mail, by contrast, is located on a personal workstation; you have a mail client (also known as a ‘mailer’ or ‘e-mail program’) on your machine and you use this application to connect to your service provider’s mail server.

Web-based E-mail

As a student at Mie University, you are entitled to your own free web-based mail account. Your user name and password will allow you to log into the system and use it immediately. After you log in, you will find a link to an online manual which tells you about the available features. If you have problems with this mail account, do not hesitate to contact the system administrator.

On the web you will find a number of free web-based e-mail services such as the one offered by Yahoo! Japan. Many people who use mail clients as their primary form of e-mail have found it convenient to use such an additional web-based account. This is because web-based mail can be used wherever you have access to the web, so you can check your mail when you are out of town or even when you are travelling abroad. A Yahoo! account even allows you to check other accounts, which means that you can travel anywhere on the planet and still check your regular e-mail account. Note, however, that many computers outside of Japan will not be able to display Japanese characters.

To sign up for a free web-based e-mail account at Yahoo! Japan just fill in the form and provide as little information as you can get away with. Make sure that you un-check the box which asks Yahoo to send you advertising; you don’t want that.

Web-based e-mail has its limitations, though. For instance, you will only be allowed to take up a certain amount of server space to store old messages. If you use e-mail regularly, this space will fill up fairly quickly and you will have to start deleting old messages. Starting a local e-mail client is also quicker than logging into a web-based account, so most e-mail users have an e-mail client on the machine they use most frequently.

Since e-mail is a global medium and many people outside of Japan lack Japanese language support, you should tell your web mail application to give your name in Latin characters. To latinise the user name in your university e-mail account, go to the Main Screen (メインメニュー) and select Change User Information (ユーザ情報の変更). Then change your name and hit the Save (保存) button.

POP/IMAP E-mail

Choosing a Program

Which e-mail client should you use, then? Mac users are usually happy with the mail program that comes with their operating system, desktop users of Linux may find Kmail, which is part of KDE, a reasonable choice.

If you use Windows, you are most likely to have Outlook or Outlook Express installed on your system. This application, like many Microsoft products, has a fairly bad reputation for its lack of safety, however, and its various loopholes are frequently exploited by people who write malicious code such as viruses (these people are called ‘crackers’, by the way: hackers build things, crackers try to break things). You might therefore wish to look for something else; John De Hoog maintains a page which discusses the merits and demerits of Japanese e-mail clients on the Windows platform. Go there and pick one.

Installing a new e-mail client on your system should not be a great problem. Most programs come with an automated installation process that does most of the work for you, but you will need to enter your mail server’s IP address, your user name and your password.

Configuring Your Program

Once you’ve got your e-mail program up and running, you can tweak its settings. One thing you should do is make sure that the messages you write carry your name in romaji. If you use Japanese characters, recipients of your messages who happen to lack Japanese language support (the majority of people outside of Japan) will only see mojibake.

To change your user name in Outlook Express, do the following:
ツール | アカウント | メール | プロパティ | 全般 | ユーザー情報　名前

To do the same in Eudora:
ツール（T） | オプション（O） | 本名（R）

More importantly, however, turn off MIME/HTML! HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is properly used to create web pages. Many e-mail clients also allow HTML for text formatting, which lets you to define fonts, font sizes, font colours, and even include images. However, HTML messages make you look like a tourist who is not familiar with the local customs of the internet. Gerald E. Boyd tells you why this is so and how you can turn off HTML in your e-mail client. His page discusses the English versions of e-mail clients, but I’m sure you will be able to adapt what he says.

Three

Further Reading

For a more detailed introduction, see Kaitlin Duck Sherwood’s A Beginnner’s Guide to Effective Emails.