While reading through emails recently, I stopped to think about proper etiquette when emailing - and how we really don't put present the type of business impression, when communicating via email, that we do when we meet someone in person! So I thought I would give just a few short suggestions related to email etiquette in concern to the business world.
Your "from" name: Be sure to actually have your correct name in the From field. It should also be properly formatted. When a customer receives a message from "johnny" instead of "John S. Appleseed", it just isn't as professional. Also, it should be "John S. Appleseed", not "john s. appleseed".
User proper greetings: Be sure to use common courtesy. Use Hello, Mr., Ms., Mrs., Dear, etc. until the contact tells you to call them otherwise. Referring to someone too casual, without first having some sort of relationship with them, may not sit well with the other person.
Addressing: If you send an email to multiple recipients, especially recipients that do not know each other, address the message to yourself - and then add the other addresses in the BCC field. This protects the identity of the other recipients, and keeps their email addresses safe from potential spammers. The BCC fields stands for "Blind Carbon Copy", addresses in this field will receive a copy of the message but it will not show their address anywhere in the header (in the "to" field).
Just last week Apple rolled out their MobileMe service, which takes the place of their .Mac service. MobileMe is Exchange for those of us without Exchange server. MobileMe introduces "push" email, calendar, and contacts between your computer (doesn't have to be a Mac, works with PCs also!) and your mobile iPhone device.
Apple also introduced a brand new AJAX interface for the web based version of MobileMe. You can drag and drop, do "live updates" and more with your email, calendar, and contacts. You can also have multiple calendars. You may want a calendar for your business, one for personal, and seperate calendars for other aspects of your life. One click allows you to enable or disable each calendar - and each seperate calendar can have it's own color, which makes it easy to seperate your calendar entries.
So what is "push technology"?
Traditional email works by fetching mail (pull). Periodically your email client will connect to the mail server and download any new messages or changes. Calendar and contact entries are usually not replicated to the server. The only exception is with Microsoft Exchange - which is an expensive solution which, like most Microsoft products, can be very buggy and require a lot of time to manage it.
So, in comes MobileMe which allows us "ordinary folk" to have Exchange like email - but without all of the buggy software and overhead to manage it. Push technology is built in to the iPhone 2.0 firmware as well as Mac Leopard (added through a patch from Software Update), there is nothing else to install. However, for your Windows PC you'll need to download and install a small application which will handle the push functionality.
As any business owner (or artist, dreamer, "computer nerd", etc.) will tell you, having a website is a big deal. You spend a lot of time making sure the design is just right, the images look just perfect, and the text says just the right thing. Building a website can be a months long project. Being the owner of a website can bring you pride, joy, and a sense of satisfaction. But that sense of satisfaction can quickly fade away when you discover that someone else has copied the contents of your site without your approval!
It should be noted that anytime that you write ANYTHING, it is copyrighted. Anytime you create graphics or take pictures, etc., it is copyrighted! You can file a few forms and register for a copyright, that however is not necessary in order for it to be illegal when someone steals (copies or reproduces) the things that you have created. So, just to make sure it is crystal clear; any written text, drawings, paintings, graphics, computer software, photographs, etc. that you yourself create - is covered by copyright laws.
As with red lights, stop signs, and speed limits, just because there is a law doesn't mean that it is followed. You can rest assured that if you have content that is of interest to someone else, it will end up on someone else's site. It has even happend to LDS, while researching for this article I found (using the tool mentioned below) five other sites who have taken our privacy policy word for word.
So how do I know if someone has performed copyright infringement by copying my content?
It is official! Today we kick off the IT Today blog here at LDS!
We understand that it may take some time before it catches on - this is something that we have started without any advertising build up, etc., so we know it will be slow going at first. But, we encourage you all to jump in and comment, have a great time, and hopefully we'll learn something in the process. We hope to have some great articles on subjects that effect IT "people" as well as design and development folks like myself.
With that being said, there is only a few rules...
Keep it clean! No nasty or vulgure stuff!
Be respectful of others!
Have fun!
We look forward to utilizing this new avenue of interaction on our web site - and we hope you do also!
IT Today Blog
