Text messaging is a form of mail that allows you to exchange messages up to 160 characters in text format to a smart phone, page, PDA or other handheld device.

It's wise to remember how easily email -- this wonderful technology -- can be misused and misdirected, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences. Unless you are using encryption, the privacy of your message cannot be guaranteed nor the authenticity of your correspondent.

Consider the case of a man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in sunny Florida. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email, who was planning to meet him there the next day.

Unfortunately, when typing her address, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife whose husband had just passed away. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a wail, and fell to the floor in a faint.

At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this email note on the screen:

"Dearest Wife, Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow. P.S. Sure is hot down here."

What actually hurts here is that the email was not being intercepted but rather, inadvertently directed to the wrong location. The nickname feature in many mailers can cause accidental emails being sent to co-workers instead of family members, or vice-versa. It’s a strange new kind of miscommunication, where you can misdirect emails a dozen times before lunch. At least with misdialed phone numbers it becomes apparent after a few moments and you usually stop before saying too much. With email, it is now possible to quickly send a completely coherent message that is nonetheless nearly incomprehensible to a mistaken recipient.

Bigger mistakes can come from an accidental “reply” or even worse, “reply all” instead of “forward”. A recent example would be when a congressional staffer accidentally hit “reply all” when intending to forward a comment to fellow staffers on a “Support the Captive Primate Safety Act” email he’d received from an animal rights group. The original email was supporting legislation to prohibit the keeping of primates such as monkeys and great apes as pets, and asking for co-sponsors to protect not only animals but humans as well, as there are inherent dangers in keeping such pets. The staffer’s comment was meant to be funny, and read: “Does this deal with those kids out in Ohio(?) who were kept in cages?” However, this email went out to the legislators behind the Captive Primate Safety Act instead of being forwarded as an inside “joke”, leading to a very sticky political exchange.

Other instances of email misdirection puts organizations In legal and/or financially risk, causing a number of compliance issues. A 2005 Harris Interactive® for Fortiva poll, shows that 68 per cent of U.S. employees who use email at work have sent or received email via their work email account that could place their company at risk.

While all these examples may be a good arguments as to why you should disable the “reply all” function altogether, the fact remains that the way a standard, unprotected email is sent out is very akin to the mailing of a postcard. With the wrong address attached there is nothing, not even an envelope, to dissuade an unintended recipient from reading about, for instance, the naughty things you did while in Vegas. Even worse, the mistaken recipient can in turn “reply” and you could be end up with unsolicited correspondences for the lifetime of that email address.

Use it wisely, and email is indeed a wonderful tool. Email is fast, easy to use and has become a cultural method of propelling personal and business communication. The bottom line is this - do not trust confidential information to email unless you are using security such as encryption or rights management. Whether it’s due to misdirected email or breach of email etiquette, your email could be exposing yourself to more than you know.

About The Author

Nan Schwarz is the director of creative marketing at Essential Security Software and is responsible for worldwide creative marketing strategy and execution, corporate branding, and public relations. Essential Security Software (ESS) is a provider of document and email security solutions. ESS has developed a premier, easy-to-use, peer-to-peer content protection and user rights management solution that enables small business owners and individuals to securely distribute sensitive email messages and documents while protecting the privacy, integrity and authenticity of their intellectual property. ESS believes that people have the right to affordable security software technology that is powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use.

essentialsecurity.com

nans@essentialsecurity.com

For those who want to be among the throng who are rushing to send out their greeting cards via every possible types of mail service, then online greeting it is.

Although this is a wise choice, it is important to note that there are some things that should be considered first before opting to go HTML. There are many cases where the texts do not appear the same from one computer to another.

Also the images that you have put into them may seem messy or cluttered. Besides, loading time will become an impossible task if there are a large number of images used in the greeting.

Here are some thoughts about HTML email that may help you decide to go or go against HTML email:

1. Email is probably the most spammed way of technological communication. With everybody already going online and trying to market anything and everything under the sun, this is understandable.

2. Most security issues and virus breakouts are caused by email or messaging software and users who do not know better than to click a link or run an attachment. Enough knowledge and understanding on the things that needed to be done is the solution to these.

3. The display size of email programs is totally unknown. Take note that nobody is opening emails full screen by default.

4. Multipart emails, embedded images and HTML, might be filtered out as spam or possible virus threats. And putting on some notice or sign about the fact that you are sending a greeting card is not a guarantee also. They might dismiss it as a stunt.

5. Different email clients support CSS/HTML to different degrees. This is in addition to online email clients like gmail, yahoo or hotmail. It is a bit like frustrating to make everything perfect for about 20 different browsers.

6. Multipart HTML email can get quite big. Your recipients may not have the needed patience to wait for the page to open.

Think about these things first. Do you want to spend a lot of time on something that is very likely not to work out and spook your clients or wish them during occasions?

The solution for maintaining contact with your clients through special occasions? Host your ecard on a server, send them a link.

Then you will know that the email will arrive and not cause warning lights to go on and you draw visitors to your site to boot.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit http://www.losangelesprintingservice.com

About The Author

Florie Lyn Masarate got the flair for reading and writing when she got her first subscription of the school newsletter in kindergarten. She had her first article published on that same newsletter in the third grade

article compliments of ArticleCity.com

Email is a wonderful tool, especially if used properly.

I’m part of a group of five or six friends, who “physically” get together most weekends (as opposed to virtually). We also email each other, usually every few days, to generally trade jokes, share news, and discuss scheduling problems to do with when we are next getting together. We are starting to talk on Messenger too.

One Monday a few weeks ago, our emailing rate suddenly spiked to more than thirty emails in about twelve hours. Unfortunately this was a few days after someone new had just joined our group. Luckily she didn’t flee in terror, and things calmed down.

Things really NEEDED to calm down because most of the thirty plus emails were coming from a fight between two of my friends. I’ll call them Katrina and Chris.

Hopefully, reading this article won’t restart the fight. (If it does I’ll expect an angry email or two saying, ‘I won’t be coming on Sunday…or ever again.’)

Let me repeat. Email is wonderful, if used right. After the fight cooled down a little, Chris even mentioned that the nature of sending and receiving emails allows one to think before you reply, if you take the time.

If someone emails you and says you are an idiot, you can safely write the scathing reply you want to, full of all manner of the foulest insults and bad language. I recommend you write just such a vicious answer.

But write it with a word processor program, rather than directly into a blank email. You get all kinds of help with spelling, editing, and punctuation. It is massively embarrassing to get an email saying that you are an idiot, and then have even one misspelled word in your (meant to be) derisive reply.

The more important reason to write your reply in a word processor is that you can’t click ‘send’ the moment you finish writing. You can’t fire it off without opening a new email and then ‘cut-and-pasting’ your acidic words into it, which gives you a minute to cool down.

Ideally, give yourself an hour or more to cool down in a situation as this. After half an hour, reread the email you are responding too. Did they say ‘you are an idiot’, or ‘you look like an idiot when you don’t spell check’?

If you hadn’t guessed already, Katrina and Chris didn’t take an hour, or even a few minutes to cool down before replying to each others emails. Usually, both are more sensible so maybe they just had an off-day on the same day. Or, maybe they had real and genuine complaints about each other that needed to be discussed and resolved.

Regardless of why they did it, they then traded a series of steadily more insulting emails, replying to each other without taking time to cool down. Our group received more than thirty emails. One email somehow got sent to ‘undisclosed recipients’, which sparked accusations of bizarre cover ups involving secretly sharing our private business with mysterious shadowy strangers.

Eventually they took their fight to a more private level, no longer ‘CC’ing their insults to the rest of us. In this private exchange I think the insults got even more vicious.

No longer getting ‘CC’ed emails, from either Chris to Katrina or Katrina to Chris, I thought that they both had calmed down and grown up. Then out of the blue, both of them emailed me offering to drop out of the group. We nearly lost them both because they couldn’t stand to be in the same room together after what they’d said in their rapid-fire emails. I spent days talking to them both on Messenger to sort it out. We did even lose Chris for a few weeks. However, I left the door open for him to return and eventually he did.

Email is a wonderful tool. But be careful, you can burn your bridges if you don’t use it with a cool head.

About The Author

Allan T. Price
www.m6.net

Allan T. Price is a creative writer working at M6.Net: ‘The web-hosting company for humans.’ M6.Net is working hard to help humanity experience the power and freedom to develop their own part of the Internet, to share their information and connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

article compliments of ArticleCity.com

Top Informational Websites

MSN Hotmail

List of Acronyms & text messaging shorthand

category: email and instant messaging


Mail.com messenger