E-mail is the most frequently-used feature on the Internet, more popular even than the Web. Over the many years it has been used (going back to the early 1970s), lots of standards, traditions, and guidelines have developed regarding the formatting of e-mail messages. If your messages fail to abide by these principles, they risk being unreadable in one or another of the multiplicity of mail reader programs in use, or annoying the recipient and possibly provoking a dreaded Internet Flame War. I created this site to explain the ins and outs of e-mail, bringing together in one site (for the first time that I am aware of) discussion of all the different aspects of the format of an e-mail message. If you've wondered what all the message headers mean, or how to try to figure out where a piece of spam with a bogus return address really came from, or what somebody means when they yell at you for "top posting", or why somebody says your messages are hard to read because the lines stretch out indefinitely to the right, you'll find the answers to these and other questions in this site.

To read all the articles in this site, start with the first one and keep following the "Next" links. Or, if you're looking for a particular topic, get to it from the menu below.

• Headers -- See what goes in the head of a message and what you can learn from it.

• Body -- The main part of a message; how should the text be formatted?

• Trailers -- Stuff tagged onto the end of a message, such as your signature.

• Quoting -- All about replying to, quoting from, and forwarding messages, including the Great Top vs. Bottom Posting Debate.

• Attachments -- Sending pictures and other files attached to a message.

• Configuration -- How to set your mail program to follow the standards and avoid common problems.

• Tools -- Check e-mail messages for format problems.

Links

Throughout this site, I have links to other sites with relevant information. I don't necessarily endorse or agree with everything said on every one of these sites, but I think they provide useful additions to what I discuss here. Links related to specific topics are on the appropriate pages; here are a few more general sites on the subject of e-mail and related issues.

• RFC 1855 -- netiquette guidelines
• RFC 2822 -- mail format standards
• E-Mail Format
• Songweaver guide to email netiquette
• Email etiquette
• Another email etiquette guide
• A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email
• The Tyranny of Email
• How to Write Effective Mailing List Email
• Writing Sensible E-Mail Messages
• E-mail format issues
• The End of History: How e-mail is wrecking our national archive (ironically, the article succumbed to linkrot, but is retrievable from the Internet Archive)
• Reviews of 'next generation' mail programs
• Spam Primer -- about spam and how to stop it
• Class project on Routine E-Mail Messages and Memos
• E-Mail Standards -- a site advocating more standards compliance in mail clients (though its focus seems to be limited to HTML standards, not the various other areas at issue in e-mail client standards compliance).
• The Email Charter is another attempt to get people to follow its author's idea of netiquette.
• What your email style says about your personality

This page was first created 13 Apr 2003, and was last modified 6 Sep 2021.
Copyright © 2003-2021 by Daniel R. Tobias. All rights reserved.