academhack » Email

Email Part Deux-Or Revisiting the Prior Post

dave — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:29:33 +0000

Sometimes you write a post thinking it is no big deal, just a reference to something, and all of a sudden gets more interest than you would think. So it went with the prior post about Boston College no longer offering campus email accounts to students.
In my mind I thought this was a no-brainer. So much a no-brainer I really didn’t spend much time explaining why I thought it was a good idea. Well commenters, and emailers, disagreed so I thought I would explain a bit more.

Campuses got in the business of offering email prior to hotmail and gmail, when many students arrived at campus without having an email account. In fact my first email account in 1993 was a uchicago account. Given that moment in the development of the internet it only made sense for campuses, regardless of infrastructure cost to offer accounts to all of their students. The only way that they could be assured that students had email accounts was to provide them. This in turn produced a low cost way for campuses to communicate with their student body. And for the most part students used these accounts as their primary accounts. Indeed I recall when students used to scramble to figure out how to keep their email accounts after leaving college, because it was their primary or only account.

Fast forward to now, most, in not all of our students come to campus with an existing email account, one which they have used for several years already, one attached to their “online identity” (okay I really don’t believe in the idea of online vs. offline identity, hence the scare quotes, but you get my point). So having a campus email address is now a burden, one more piece of information for them to monitor, which they generally only begrudgingly do, because the only communication they get via this account if official campus stuff. (In fact the younger generations don’t use email nearly as much, instead relying on text messaging, but I digress.)

Allowing students to register their accounts they use as their official accounts greatly increases the chance of reaching them, and doesn’t create a “garbage account” that they will only be so happy to get rid of when they leave the institution.

But what about the students that don’t already have an account?

Good question, but wouldn’t it be better to teach those students how to get a free account, one they can continue to use later in life after they have left the institution. I for one believe in empowering students.

What about just having an official account which they can forward?

Fine by me. But why bother? If you are just going to create an account which they then forward to another account why bother with the time an effort of managing such a system. Instead, free up the server space, save money, and have the IT folks teach people digital literacy skills. Perhaps each address would be just a forward service that students are required to point somewhere else. This would work, but seems like an extra step. Just require students to register an email account, like any online registration does, done.

What about Privacy?

This is a red-herring. There is no privacy and the university supplying “safe” email accounts just teaches students bad habits. Instead teach them how to maximize security on their own. Honestly I have more problems with the official institutional email addresses I am forced to have then I ever do with the ones I manage myself.

But having a .edu address is useful.

Only because other people/institutions treat .edu with a special import, one which is probably starting to fade. At any rate said institutions would deal when suddenly large numbers of students don’t have .edu addresses.

But as Faculty I like my account.

Faculty seems a bit more reasonable to me, the relationship is longer term and as a representative of said institution you might want to officially sign your email as relating to the university. I personally find it a pain, but it seems a reasonable investment for a school to provide official addresses for employees. But please for the love of all that is holy, let me forward it out of that account.

But student emails might get stuck in spam filters.

Again an important intelligence for students to learn,: how to craft an email that will not, and which free services are best. Again my own spam filters do a much better job of accurately filtering than do the ones the university sets up.

It’s a liability issue, institutions have to have official channels they can be sure students receive.

Again you are far more likely to reach the student on the email account they do read rather than the one you want them to read. If you want a guarantee send a courier and have them sign for it, otherwise no guarantee, campus email or not. This is again where providing students email produces a false sense of security.

What about security?

You really think students read those security updates? Besides they are far more likely to read them if they go to the account they check regularly rather than the one they only check occasionally. Important principle of communication: If you want someone to hear you state it on a channel they usually listen to. Wouldn’t hurt to make them interesting/fun to read. I have seen a few like this, and students are far more likely to read if they aren’t official campus speak. And for real emergencies email is not fast enough try text messaging.

But I like my harvard.edu address.

Seriously? Okay if you want to carry your college address around with you like that 20 year old college sweatshirt trying to brag and relive the glory days of your college years, trading on the prestige of an institution rather than your own reputation feel free, but Universities should just start charging for this. Consider it premium service.

Are institutions going to start providing all students with a cell phone and number since they text each other to communicate? Obviously not. Managing student email accounts is just spending bad money.

The Future of Campus Email

dave — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:23:26 +0000

Boston College takes the important step of not providing incoming freshmen with email addresses. I have argued this before, but, I simply don’t understand why campuses spend so much money trying to maintain and provide students with email addresses. There are so many free services out there, ones which students who are coming into the university are already comfortable with using. Now I know someone is going to mention privacy in the comments here, so let me preempt that comment. Privacy here is a red herring, rather than provide students with a false sense of privacy related to an email account they don’t use we should teach them how to responsibly use the one they will.

Handling Email (Re-post)

dave — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:42:50 +0000

Seeing as the semester is starting and I have had several people ask me about this already I thought I would link back to the posts I wrote at the beginning of last semester. This is a five part series (rather elaborate write-up) I did that explained how I handle email.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Bonus Entry on Creating Student Email Lists
Note: Parts I-V address both Mac and PC, but the final entry only shows a tutorial for creating email lists through Mail.app (Mac only).

And if you want you can get the Quicktime Movie Tutorial by clicking the image below.(This is free from RapidShare, just scroll to the bottom of the link and select “free.”)

Email Etiquette

dave — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:14:51 +0000

Be Polite Use BCC

Hawkwings has a post about controlling HTML in email. This is one of those things that tends to annoy me, people who send emails with lots of HTML formatting just to make them look nice. So, you get emails in your inbox that are huge (in size) but only contain a few words, and take extra time to retrieve. Really I just need the words, not flowery stationery. (Agreed this is a preference thing but. . . ) Hawkwings walks through the steps to make everything plain text and fix this problem.

This however reminded me of a larger pet-peeve of mine. BCC vs CC. Have you ever received an email (spam or otherwise) that contains extra names in the address field. Sometimes I get these from people I know, with like 60 addresses. The hey I just changed my address and I want to let everyone know here it is. Well this is a HUGE problem. Why? Because now 60 people all have your email address, some of which you probably do not know, and it only takes one of them to have a virus to have all 60 addresses sent to some spam service. (The most egregious error I have seen in this regard, was by the book store, which copy and pasted all of the email for all of the faculty into one large to field.) Spammers actually pay for email addresses, and the practice of CCing people rather than BCCing them helps them to collect all of these addresses.

There are two ways to address an email to more than one person. CC-which stands for carbon copy and BCC which stands for Blind Carbon Copy. The key here being “blind.” If you CC someone, everyone gets all of the email address, all 60 of the people. But if you BCC them people only get their own. Problem solved. I will admit there are uses for CC. For example committee work when you email a group and want people to respond to the whole group, so they need everyone’s email. But, as a general principle you should BCC people and only CC them if you have a specific reason.

UPDATE Read the comments below as Mark and David have important things to add.

Email Power-Up

dave — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:09:45 +0000

Despite the recent claims about email being for old people, I am always looking for ways to “power-up” (yes, I am on a bit of a digital games kick lately—writing that chapter of the dissertation) email. Two resources are incredibly valuable for this process:

HawkWings: Is the site for all things Mac email. I check here first if I am looking for a plugin to do something fancy in email. Perhaps the most useful resource is the Plugin Repository. The site is also a blog that posts frequently with email related material.
If you are a thunderbird user you should take some time to look through Thunderbird add-ons to find a large repository of ways to make your email better, from themes to change the look to ways to enhance security.

Avoid Email Attachment Errors

dave — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:30:00 +0000

File this under “how come no one ever told me about this before.” I picked this up from this recent MacWorld post about handling email. There are some good tips on this article. But the one that got me: There is a plugin to help you not forget to attach files. Basically the plugin reads outgoing messages for the word attach (or derivations of) and if there is no attachment reminds you that you might want to attach the file. For someone like me who sends a lot of attachments and often forgets to attach said document, this saves me the embarrassing second, “Sorry forgot to attach this” email. Simple, yet brilliant. Plus the example email refers to the TPS report of Office Space fame. (Warning for the spelling challenged such as myself, this only works if you spell attachment correctly.)

How To Create Student Email Lists in Two Minutes

dave — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:28:05 +0000

(Okay in all honesty this takes more than two minutes the first time, but after you do it once or twice it only takes two.)

Just cause Jenn asked here is a post on how to create an email group for your classes, actually I was working on this (I wasn’t going to leave all of those people hanging with the start of the semester approaching), but it is the most complicated of the email tricks so it has taken me a while to get the explanation set-up (thanks to my brother for his help). But don’t fear, it is much easier than it looks, and there are screenshots along the way.

Okay, so the goal here is to create an email distribution list for all of your students. This way you can type in one word, for example â€œEnglish 205zâ€ (see that’s technically one word and one number) and the mail program will automatically email all of your students. Over the course of the semester this is tremendously useful. I use it to email reminders about class, especially if we are going to be in the computer lab for the day, so they don’t show up for class late having gone to the wrong location, or if I see something in the news I want them to read, or whatever; the goal for me is to increase my chance to reach students in a medium which they are likely to hear.

Step One: Getting all the Email Addresses

The thing that makes this work is requiring all of your students to email you on the first day of class. I covered my rules for email in a previous post but the ones that concerns us here are about the first day assignment:

Students should email you with their full name in the body of the email (this way you can search for them later in you emails).
The subject line of the email should list the class name or number.

This gives you all of the student’s email addresses so you don’t have to type them in, but now the trick is getting them all together into a group. The Mac address book allows you to create a group and assign people to it, but you would have to manually do this; clicking and dragging 60 names into different lists. This is do able but would take far more time than I want to spend, especially when there is an easier way. . .

Step Two: Mail Scripts

Think of scripts as little programs that your computer can run to help another program. This particular script will allow you to create a group list from all of the selected emails. So, the first thing to do is go to the Mail Scripts web site and download the scripts. Click on the drive image that is downloaded and up should pop a drive on your desktop called â€œMail Scripts 2.7.10â€. Open this. You should be able to click the install icon; Mail Scripts handles the rest. There is a lot you can do with these scripts outside of what I am about to cover, but the key one will create student email lists with only about 2 minutes of effort on your part.

Step Three: Highlight all the Messages

Open up your mail program, now all of you student emails should be in a classes folder (using the technique from an earlier post). Select that folder and look at all of the messages in there. In the screenshot below you can see an example of what I am talking about, notice all of the emails are from me as I set this up as a demo, but the important part here is to look at the subject line. Notice how these emails are from two different classes. I am going to create a list that only emails students who have emailed me with 205z in the subject line.

Your inbox should look something like this:

You want to highlight all of the messages with the subject line for the particular class you are creating an email list for, in this case I am highlighting all of the ones that say 205z. You can highlight multiple messages by holding down the Command key (the one with the apple on it) and clicking a message. When you are done it should look something like this:

Step Four:Run Mail Scripts

Now without clicking anything else in mail (so that these messages stay highlighted), open up your applications folder, and open up the folder inside this that is labeled â€œMail Scripts.â€ Inside this folder are all of the ones you can run, but for now we only need the first one â€œAdd Addresses.â€ Click this to run it. If you have followed all of the steps you should get a screen that looks something like this:

You probably want to take a brief scan at the email addresses as it might pick up some extra ones (it gets all the addresses, so for example if a student had an extra address in the body of an email it would be here) and unclick any of the ones you do not want. Under the line that says â€œSelect Group to add addresses toâ€ select create new group, and give it a name; in this case I will name it English 205z.

Emailing Your Class

You can check to see if this has worked by opening up the address book, and seeing if there is a group with the new name and that that group has all of the addresses in it. Now when you compose a message all you have to do is type â€œEnglish 205zâ€ and it automatically addresses the message to all of the students in the group. It is a good practice to put the addresses in the bcc field, rather than the â€œtoâ€ field or the â€œccâ€ field as this way students who want to keep their addresses private, or free from spam, don’t have it going out to the whole group. I always put my own address in the â€œtoâ€ field.

Repeat steps three and four for any other classes. Now if a student adds you class late, after you have created this list, you can just manually add them to the list using the address book rather than redoing all of the steps.

Difficulty:

Email Screencast Update

dave — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:44:40 +0000

I am still experimenting with ways to get the screencast about managing email down to a reasonable size. If you read the final post in the handling email series and wanted to see the screencast, but the google video was frustrating send me email me.I am trying out some of the free services like DropSend and YouSendIt as a way to transfer large files. So, if you want a large version (80mg), and can play Quicktime (this is a free video player) let me know and I can try and get it to you.

Handling Email (Part V) Putting it all together

dave — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 21:37:21 +0000

(This is now the fifth installement in the series on how I manage email. You might want to start with the begining. Read the most important one on why you need a mail program. And look thru the rules I tell my students (which contains my way of collecting email addresses). Lastly checking out the way I sort email and keep my inbox clean.

Keyboard Shortcuts, Tossing Email and a Screencast

In this post I am going to cover most of the final pieces: how I â€œtossâ€ email around (Act-On), how I check email start to finish, and a few other misc. items. Finishing it all off with a screencast.

First Up: Keyboard Shortcuts

Generally speaking Keyboard Shortcuts are the single greatest thing one can do to improve time spent on the computer. One of the things that I like about the Mac is how well these work across a range of platforms (which is not to say that this doesn’t happen in Windows, but not to my liking). And while you should try to use these as much as possible across all applications, I thought I would point out a few key ones for handling mail. This page at mozilla lists many of the keyboard shortcuts you will need across a range of mail programs (the ones I list below are for Apple Mail).

You don’t need to learn them all, you can slowly add as you go (you can try printing them out and posting them next to your desk to reference), but for now definetly learn: Get New Messages (Command+Shit+N), Hide-this will â€œput awayâ€ the program when you are done with it (Command+H), Compose New (Command+N), Send (Command+Shift+D) (that’s D as in deliver as S is for save), Reply (Command+R), and Forward (Command+Shift+F). This way I can check my email by hitting F3 (this is a Quicksilver Hotkey) + Command+Shift+N and than put the program away when I am done with it Command+H, never reaching for the mouse.

Quick Hint

Set your mailbox to not automatically refresh/get new messages. Most people have their mail program running all the time, and checking for new messages every five minutes. This makes mail feel like an always possible interruption, do I really want the semi-profound thought about Heidegger I am writing in my dissertation interupted by the noise of a new email? Instead turn off auto-refresh and get used to checking email when you want. (Seriously the first time someone told me this I thought, â€œyou’re crazyâ€ I love auto refresh, but now I would never go back. To check email only requires one extra keystroke.)

Next Up: Act-On

Like I covered in the last post, the key to handling email effecitively is getting it out of your inbox and into the place it needs to be in order to deal with it. This alone will make your email life so much better. Now you could just click and drag each email into the appropriate folder, but this would take time, and require reaching for the mouse with every email. Plus, it ends up being a little to easy to accidently drag it to the wrong place. Enter Act-On. This is the most ridiculously useful email tool, other than a mail program. Act-On is for Apple Mail only, but if you are a Thunderbird user try Quick File it works pretty much the same way. (If you are an Outlook user your on your ownâ€”actually just give it up and switch to Thunderbird it will make yours and everyone else’s life easier.) Act-On allows me to press a simple keyboard shortcut and sort or â€œtossâ€ if you will the email to where I want it to be. So, for example I get an email from a student which I want to put in my Student Respond folder, I just press Control+R and the message is automatically moved to that folder. (Act-On works by adding rules in the preference windowâ€”see the Act-on page for instructions on how to set this up. Warning: This can be a little tricky, it might take you an hour or so to set-up but it is worth the effort I promise.)

A Screencast

So you can see a screencast, putting this all together. But before you click on over to google to see it, a few notes. First the resolution isn’t that great, you can’t read the text, when I made the screencast I tried to talk thru most of it, but I didn’t realize how low the final resolution on google would be. So you might first want to look back at the screencaptures from earlier posts as that way you can get a sense of the folder labels which are unreadable in the screencast. Second, this is my first stab at making a screencast tutorial so be nice please (actually I am trying to get this down for something else coming up on this blog which will need screencasts). I will look into ways to host higher resolution ones later, but for this one you can get an idea of what is going onâ€”it pretty much just gives you a walk through of everything I talked about in the prior posts. Finally it isn’t clear in the screencast but Act-On has a â€œhot keyâ€ associated with it, so when I say â€œtossâ€ it to c”lasses” I am pressing â€œControl (My Act-On Key) + F (The key I have designated in Act-On for classes.). Click for the Screencast on Handling Email.

And that should wrap-up my thoughts on email, I might have a few misc. posts along the way, but if you get to handling email this way it turns email from a nuisance and hassle (like all those prof. interviewed by the NYTimes opined) and makes it into an excellent pedagogical tool and time saver (I actually enjoy getting emails from students as it shows that they are invested enough to carry class time past the walls of the Humanities building).

Handling Email (Part IV)

dave — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:28:09 +0000

(This is now the fourth installement in the series on how I manage email. You might want to start with the initial explination. Read the intro on why you need a mail program. And look thru the rules I tell my students. This should explain everything up till this point.)

Allright up until now has just been some of the basic info, the “barebones” if you will of handling email. But this entry starts the “key” tricks for managing all of those emails you get from students during the school year, this is the stuff that will make you the envy of all those who feel overwhelmed by email. The first thing to do is set up folders in a way that will help you stay organized.

First a meta-explination:

Let me start by saying I didn’t develop any of this, I am not an expert at it, I pretty much stole these ideas and techniques from others. They just work so well I try to recommend this to everyone I know, especially those whose “work” life involves receiving emails.

An inbox is an inbox, not a storage container for all of your emails. I seriously know people who have over 2000 messages in their inbox. This makes handling email difficult for several reasons. First, you have to load your inbox to see you messages, loading 2000+ emails can take time. Second, this amount of “stuff” in an inbox can be psychologically oppressing. Third, this makes it hard to sort thru all of your emails and distinguish between ones you are saving and ones that you have yet to deal with. You wouldn’t create a huge pile at home of all the mail you have received over the last two years, stacking it higher and higher as the mailman brings you new letters everyday, why handle email this way? You would not believe how much a relief it is every day to have an inbox which looks like this:

This is a way of handling email generally referred to as “Inbox Zero.” You can read a wonderful collection of posts and tutorials about this at 43 Folders. I am just going to cover the basics here, with a few nods towards my specific concerns as a professor. Once you get started it is worth your time to read this whole series, as it also talks thru how to deal with those 2000+ emails in your inbox now.

The general philosophy behind handling email this way is to keep your inbox at zero thus the rather cleverly named “inbox zero.” No, this doesn’t mean that you answer and delete every email that comes into your inbox, not at all. But rather, that when an email comes in you decide what has to be done with it, and put it in its appropriate place to handle it when you can; sorting email that needs to be acted on from email that needs to be stored. Again as with regular mail its like separating out the magazines you get into one pile, throwing out the junk mail, stacking the bills in a “need to be paid file” and putting the letters that need a response in another. For whatever reason this seems intutive with postal mail, but not with email.

Folders: Your best friend.

For me the first step in getting this done is creating all the folders. Here is a close up of the folders.

Let’s just focus on the ones under “Albany” (the other folders you see in the first screenshot are for other accounts). Let’s start with the three in the middle labeled “Needs Response&rdquo,; ”Student Response,“ and ”Waiting Response.“

If an email comes into my inbox from a student, that requires me to do something, like email them back, comment on an assignment, schedule a meeting (response here means any sort of response not just responding to the email by writing another email, but responding as in acting) I ”toss“ said email into the ”Student Response“ folder. If an email comes in from one of my friends, colleagues, family members, etc. that requires a response (again response in the broadest terms) I ”toss“ it into the ”Needs Response“ folder.

The reason I have two separate folders here is I often want to deal with all of the students emails at once. This way I can schedule meetings with them conviently. If some of them have the same concerns I can draft one email in response to all of them rather than retyping the same email ten times. And most importantly I want to put myself into a ”time to help students“ mindset for responding to their emails rather than a ”oh god, another email just interrupted my work.“ Than at some point in the day I take ten minutes to respond to all of the emails in this folder, if some emails require lengthy responses I leave them in the folder until I have time to draft a lengthy response. This way I can handle the emails on my own schedule rather than feel that they interupt me. Handling email is a ”break“ rather than a burden. After writing for a couple of hours on my dissertation. I welcome the chance to do this kind of work.

The Waiting Response folder is for emails to which I have already responded, but am waiting for someone else to respond. This way one folder gives me a sense of all the ”outstanding“ communications I have out there.

Archive is the biggest folder in my account, this is where I throw everything that I have done/dealt with, am finished with but that is not related to classes I am teaching, but at some point in time might need to reference again. Because the apple mail program comes with a search function it is easy to search thru this folder to find what you need.

Classes is the archive for all of my student emails. Once I have finished responding to students emails this is where they go to be saved. Again as with archive easily searchable should I need to. At the end of a semester I can just pull all the emails out of this folder and move them to an archive, something like ”Classes Spring 06.“

Computer is for all of the passwords, account varification, software licenses, bug fixes etc I am tracking, this is really specfic to how I handle things so not so useful for everyone.

Finally there are the drafts, trash and sent. I put a ”z“ in front of them to get them listed alphabetically last, as their only use is when I am forced to access my account thru webmail and end up composing, deleting etc. that way.

I think the key to managing email this way is to have few enough folders that it seems manageable, but enough that you are able to sort your daily routine. Handling email this way requires that you make a habit of reviewing your needs response, waiting response type folders, or having them does you no good. And most importantly it requires that you make a habit of clearing out your inbox. If an email takes only two minutes to respond to sometimes I deal with it immediately, but I always make it a practice of clearing out the inbox, this way I feel in control of the email rather than feeling overwhelmed by it.