Email

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If you've been sent an email forward, especially the kind with some type of warning, it's worth it to try and find the email at snopes.com. For example, I just got an email forward warning about glade plugins burning down a house. When I searched snopes for "glade", I found this link:

http://www.snopes.com/toxins/glade.asp This email has been going around the internet for over a year and never been verified as a hoax or not. Things like this will happen all the time, usually from compeition (febreeze for example makes a spray can), or just someone playing a prank and seeing how many people it will get forwarded to. It's worth just browsing through the website too, lots of funny stories that are fake, and real: http://www.snopes.com/snopes.asp

Procmail is the most powerful, as well as complex, email processors there is today.

Behind the scenes

The original RFC that covers email is [RFC821].

Email is sent over port 25. To test this out, find the name of your local SMTP server. We'll assume in this example that your mail server is mail.example.com and your email address is [email protected], trying to send an email to your friend [email protected]:

 $ telnet mail.example.com 25
 Trying 10.0.0.1...
 Connected to mail.example.com.
 Escape character is '^]'.
 220 mail.yashy.com NO UCE ESMTP
 EHLO example.com
 250-mail.example.com
 250-PIPELINING
 250-SIZE 1024000
 250-ETRN
 250-STARTTLS
 250 8BITMIME
 MAIL FROM: <[email protected]>
 250 Ok
 RCPT TO: <[email protected]>
 250 Ok
 DATA
 354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>

 This is a test message

 .
 250 Ok: queued as 25CED619F

If you tried this, you should get an email shortly. Now you know what happens with your email client (Mail User Agent) behind the scenes when you send an email. Now try to be sneaky and change the MAIL FROM: header to a fake email address and see what happens.

General Etiquette

  • If your communication is solely text based, make sure you're using proper spelling and grammer as perception is everything.
  • Reread your email and see if there is anything you can take out, keep it short and to the point.

You will be respected a lot more by your reader(s) if you follow these.

Replying

  • cut out any text from the previous email that is not relevant to your reply
  • do not top post (reply underneath the text you're directly replying to)

Signatures

Email signatures are usually prefixed with a --\n and shouldn't be any more then 4 lines long. For example:

--
Al Queda
Minister of Conspiracy
Bastard, Ontario, Canada
+1(613)555-1212