By Jin Nan Goto

Today a great deal of communication takes place by email, but a surprising number of people are really bad at writing email.  Most mistakes are overlooked when sending emails out to friends and family, but when you send email to coworkers, clients, and you employer (bosses) you need to convey a sense a professionalism.  Here are some dos and do nots for writing email.

Do Not:

• Do Not, under any circumstances, compose your entire email using all capital letters.  All Caps is a way to convey shouting and should be avoided.  Often people capitalize words they want to EMPHASIZE, but it’s not acceptable in many situations.  If you can, bold any words you wish to emphasize (can only do this if your email client accepts Rich Text).
• Do not use a lot of Abbreviations.  Besides the fact that the recipient may not understand your message, abbreviated words reflect poorly on your (and/or your company’s ) professionalism.  You should instead take time and spell out words completely.   Emoticons :-) should also be avoided.
• Do not go overboard with the goofy fonts and colors.  Just because you can change the color of every third word doesn’t mean that you should.  excessive use of colors and fonts tend to distract from the message.
• Do not use “web beacons” to track the receipt of email.  Many users utilize third party services that will notify you when someone opens your email message.  Often this is a transparent one pixel image that tracks the user as the image is being loaded.  This is often done without the knowledge of the user opening the message.  It is a favorite tool of spammers and is a huge privacy issue.   There are other less invasive, although more annoying, ways of finding out if your message was read.
• Do not send any attachments unless you know the recipient and they are expecting an attachment.  Because of the threat of malware in email attachments, most users will not open them.  Try sending as much as you can in the body of the email.  If you need to send an invoice to a client, type it in the body of the email rather than on a Word document or a PDF.  If you need to send something as an attachment make sure that the recipient knows that you are sending it, and know what it is.

Dos:

• Check your spelling and grammar.   Reread your email and make sure that it makes sense and that it says what you mean.  Spending a little time looking after the little things can really add a lot to your email.
• Use a neutral tone.  Joking and sarcasm does not translate well in the written word, and avoiding those devices helps eliminate a lot of misunderstandings.
• Use the Cc field when sending copies of the email to others rather than placing all the addresses in the To field.  Also make it clear to whom you are writing to.   That way there is no confusion over who needs to respond to the email.
• Be clear and concise.  Try and place the most important information in the first paragraph and all the extra details in the subsequent paragraphs.  That way people do not need to read a long rambling email before they can get to the important information.
• Close your email and talk to the person on the phone or face to face (if possible) whenever it is appropriate rather than sending emails.  Emails can be very impersonal and if you always stick to writing email you may miss out on opportunities to get to know your coworkers.  This is especially important (although very difficult to do) if you telecommute or work from home.

References:

http://careerplanning.about.com/od/communication/a/email_etiquette.htm
http://iwillfollow.com/email.htm
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012054101033.aspx

By Jin Nan Goto

Everyone will agree that backing up your data is incredibly important.  Except people often don’t realize how important it is until they lose a file that they need. SyncToy2.0 is a free utility from Microsoft that will Sync two folders and it is useful for backing up your data.

Backing up to an external hard drive can be tedious and requires a lot of planning and thinking.  SyncToy does a great job in automating the process.  In SyncToy you will specify “folder pairs” and when you run SyncToy it will copy all changes from one folder to the other.  You can get SyncToy 2.0 here.

The first step is to create the folder pairs in SyncToy.  This is so SyncToy knows which folders need to be synchronized.  This step is fairly straightforward as you simply browse for the folders.  I select my “documents” folder and a corresponding “documents” folder on my 150 GB Western Digital External hard drive.

Then you need to chose how you want to copy files between the two folders.

• Synchronize:  The copying works in both directions.  All new files, changes, deletions on one folder is copied over to the other and vice-versa.
• Echo:  The copying only works in one direction.  New files, changes, deletions, and renames are moved from the first folder to the second.  However changes, new files, and deletions are not copied from the second folder to the first.
• Contribute:  Works in a similar way as Echo, but deletions are not copied over from one folder to another.

SyncToy 2.0 External Link

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&DisplayLang=en

By Jin Nan Goto

On June 30, 2008 Microsoft ended retail sales of the venerable Windows XP.  There are still loopholes where  people are still able to get computers with XP.  Downgrades, for instance.  The question is, when you buy a new computer what Operating System should it run XP or Vista.  The truth is that they both can do many of the same things equally well and there is no pressing reason to upgrade existing machines.  Still When the time comes to buy a new computer, here are 3 reasons why Vista is a better buy.

Reason 1. Vista is more secure than XP

UAC (user account control) is a misunderstood aspect of Vista.  The user is generally the weakest link in a computers security.  UAC limits what the user can do to modify the system and will prompt them for a password if a change to the system needs to be made.  Microsoft’s competitors Apple OS X both have similar features.  Although An argument can be made that Vista’s implementation is too strict.  While The pop-ups of UAC are annoying, they protect the users from themselves and Vista is more secure because of it.

There are other smaller security features in Vista that are worth mentioning.  For users of Vista Business and Ultimate, there is bitlocker drive encryption to protect your data.  There is also better protection of memory such as ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) which randomizes the position of windows files to protect against buffer overflows.

Reason 2. Better Hardware Support

When Vista was released it was plagued by incompatibilities, both hardware and software.  For some of the incompatible software and hardware, their vendors have not yet (and likely never will) released fixes.  This is especially true for older hardware and software.  However many of the problems with incompatibility have been fixed and all recent hardware supports Vista.  Generally most hardware and software should work with Vista and will continue to support Vista in the future.  A year and a half after Vista’s release and compatibility is where it should be.  Here is a Microsoft website with compatibility information about Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/

There is an exception, if you have mission critical device or software that you know is not compatible with Vista then of course XP is the way to go.  If the VPN client that you rely on to communicate with your office does not run on Vista then you need to stay with XP

Reason 3. Vista is more convenient

I have had Vista since it was released and I have never had to run the disk defragmenter.  Vista automatically schedules the defragmenter to run every week.  That is just plain convenient  because I won’t have to deal with a sluggish computer if I forget to defrag.

Networking in Vista is also significantly improved.  It is much easier and simpler to set up tasks like printer sharing in Vista than it was in XP.

Then there is Vista’s instant search box which is built into the start menu.  Just type the first few letters of the file or program and it finds it for you.  Every time I use a computer running XP I always miss the feature a lot.

By Jin Nan Goto

Firefox 2 introduced Inline spellchecking for the browser.  This alerts the user of misspelled words and offers suggestions for correcting spelling mistakes.  However the worlds most popular browser (Internet Explorer) does not offer this feature.

The lack of any type of spell-checking for form fields in IE is crazy, especially considering that Microsoft has included an Inline spell-check feature in Microsoft Office for years.  Since IE doesn’t have this feature natively, you need to use a plug-in to get it.  IE7Pro is a very good plug-in for IE that adds a spell-check feature as well as other useful functionality.  For instance, ad blocking for instance.  While the name includes IE7, it also supports IE6.

Here are instructions for downloading and installing IE7pro.

http://wiki.ie7pro.com/index.php/Download_and_Install_IE7Pro

Screenshot of a form using IE7pro:

The spell-checker works quite well.  The performance of IE7Pro doesn’t quite seem as snappy as the spellchecker in Firefox.  Although,Firefox supports the inline spell-check natively and not through a plug-in.  However if you have to enter a lot of text in IE then it is a very valuable tool.

By Jin Nan Goto

Free webmail services such as Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and Google Gmail are inexpensive, easy to use, and accessible anywhere that you have a browser.  Over time you may collect many email addresses and contacts that you would like to share with other email addresses.  This tip is for exporting contacts from Hotmail and importing them into the Mozilla Thunderbird email client.  However, the process is similar for most other mail services.

Step 1: Export your contacts from Hotmail

1. login to your Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail as it is now called)
2. Click on the “Contacts” button on the left of the screen
   
3. Click on the options button on the top right corner of the next screen to pull up the options for contacts
   
4. Select Export Contacts
   
5. Click the Export Contacts button and it will save you contacts as a .csv (Comma Separated Values) file

The Comma Separated Values file that you export can be read by Microsoft Excel.  You can use this same process to move all your contacts over to an excel spreadsheet.  If you are using a different webmail then hotmail, you may export your contacts as a Tab delimited file (.tab) and this file type functions in pretty much the same way as a .csv

Step 2: Import contacts into Thunderbird

1. From the Thunderbird  tools, click on Import.
2. Select “Address Book” as the type of material to import.
3. Choose “Text file (LDIF, .tab, .csv, .txt)” as the format and click on Next
   
4. From There you can browse for the contacts file  which you previously exported.

Related Posts:
Part II: Edit your contacts using Microsoft Excel and import them into Thunderbird
(added Oct. 7, 2008)

by Jin Nan Goto

Mozilla Thunderbird is a wonderful and free alternative to Microsoft Outlook.  Stationary is a useful plugin for Thunderbird that will allow you to use pre-made HTML files as templates for your email messages.  Normally email is simple text, but using HTML allows you to create colorful and dynamic looking emails.  In the small business worlds there are many uses for html mail.

• Professional looking Letterhead for your formal communications
• Attractive Advertisements/Newsletters (Be sure that any advertisements are solicited by the recipient.  You don’t want to spam people).
• Gives you greater control over the look and feel of your messages

There are some disadvantages to HTML email.  The first is that it can be a security and privacy risk.  A maliciously formed HTML page can be used to install malware on your machine(although this is usually done through a flaw in windows.  Note: Keep you computer patched).  This is why many email programs block the loading of images and many users disable the receipt of HTML email.  Regardless it still can be useful.

For these instructions to work, you need to use Mozilla Thunderbird.  You can get Thunderbird here:  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

You will also need the Stationary Plugin.  You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4394

Part 1: Install Stationary

1. Open Thuderbird
2. Click “Add-ons” from the Tools Menu
3. Drag and drop the stationary.xpi file you downloaded on to the resulting add-ons window.

Step 2: Create message using HTML Template

1. You should create your HTML Template in advance using your HTML editor or notepad (if you don’t have an HTML editor).
2. Click on the arrow to the right of the Write icon in thunderbird.  Select “Other Stationary”.  Then just browse to the template.  In the future this file will be added to the dropdown list.
   
3. Compose your email and send it.  In case the recipient has disabled HTML mail you should be sure and send your message in both plaintext and HTML.