good practice. MS Outlook users will have delivered automatically by the Unimail system.

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1 good practice This document is written with staff users in mind. It starts with a quick summary of the basic advice that we offer to users of . These points are followed by a detailed discussion of the issues involved. It is assumed that users access their mail via the University s Unimail system using Microsoft Outlook. However, some users will continue to read, send and manage their with a Mac- or Windows-based client such as Microsoft Entourage or Mozilla Thunderbird, and in this case information relevant to these users will be marked accordingly. Summary of advice Receiving your mail MS Outlook MS Outlook users will have delivered automatically by the Unimail system. Other clients Check your mail frequently (twice a day at least), but not too frequently (not more than once every ten minutes). All users Don t allow your server mailbox to grow too large by leaving mail on the server; large mailboxes left on the server (over 3 Megabytes) will slow down access to your . Managing your mail Organize your messages into mailboxes on your PC or Mac. Do not leave read messages in your inbox; file or delete them Use labels to highlight messages for different purposes Use the sort and search facilities to find messages Save attachments in your preferred Documents folder if you want to keep them; otherwise delete them. Consider using filters to discard junk mail. N.B Look out for forgeries and spam Never respond to spam Don t circulate chain letters or virus warnings Always keep your anti-virus software up to date.

2 When sending mail to an individual Consider your language and style Take care not to send confidential information to all and sundry If your material is confidential, send it in a password protected MS Word file, or don t send it all! Do not guess the intended recipient s address Do not send attachments unless they are really necessary, and if you must take care that the attachment is as small as possible. is a messaging system, not a file transfer system. If possible, always send plaintext messages, or styled and plaintext versions. Never send styled text only. Do not send more carbon copies than necessary In a reply do not include the original text if it is not essential to do so. When sending mail to lists Never send attachments Always send messages in plaintext only Be especially careful over your style and language Establish conventions with colleagues How quickly are responses expected? What do the different priority levels mean? What style is acceptable? What sort and size of attachments are acceptable? Checking your mail The University requires members of staff to check their mail at least once a day, and for many it is necessary to check very much more frequently. MS Outlook will deliver your mail automatically but if for some reason you choose not to use Outlook, you can set up your e- mail client to check automatically every so often (every ten minutes, every half hour, or whatever you think best). You should not check automatically more frequently than every ten minutes. Access to your incoming mail is controlled by your password. It is important that you are the first person to see your incoming mail. Once you have read it and determined that it is not too confidential, you can be more relaxed about the possibility of other people seeing it. It is possible to tell your client to save your password, which is convenient since it means you don t have to type it in, but it means that anyone with access to your computer can read your mail. Even if you have not told your client to save your password, it still does not ask for it every time it checks mail, only the first time you check after starting up. Again, this means that if you leave your client running, anyone with access to your computer can see your new messages. When your mail reaches your computer it will be listed in a mailbox window. You should look at the information displayed in the list, identify and delete the junk messages, then decide how urgently you should deal with the remainder. Ideally, you should only need to read a message only once, then deal with it as soon thereafter, but this will not always be possible. Also, beware of leaving too many messages to be dealt with later. If they are left too long, as more and more messages come in you will tend to forget the ones at the top of the list.

3 Filing When you check your mail with your client your messages are downloaded and stored in your Inbox. As you read each message you should either delete it or file it in another mailbox. Depending on the volume and type of mail you receive you might organise your mailboxes in different ways. One method would be to have a mailbox for each month and store all messages received in that month together. Another method would be to divide messages according to the sender or the topic covered. The only option you should avoid is to leave your messages all in your Inbox. Your client will allow you to create as many mailboxes as you like, and you can also arrange them in a hierarchy of folders if necessary. Your client also allows you to keep copies in different mailboxes, which might be an advantage if there are messages that logically belong in more than one place. You can also file your outgoing messages in different mailboxes, to keep them with the relevant incoming messages. Sorting The list of messages in a mailbox window can be sorted according to sender, or recipient in the case of out-going messages, (the Who) column, or according to any other column. To sort by a particular column, click on the column heading. You can in this way collect together all messages with a particular subject or all messages from a particular correspondent. But note that your correspondents may appear differently in different messages, sometimes with their username, sometimes with their proper name. Labelling Since you will build up large quantities of messages within some of your mailboxes, you might want to highlight some of them. Your client will have a facility for labelling messages so that when you look at the contents of your mailbox they will stand out from the others, being shown in a different colour. Use the labelling facility sparingly, because if you have too many different labels it will defeat the purpose. You can choose which parts of the mail header are displayed in the mailbox window. You do this by going to the Mailbox options. If you have used labels you can have a column for the label tag, and then you can sort by label, and so gather together all the messages that you have tagged as urgent or as awaiting reply or what ever other labels you have used. Searching Your client will have a searching facility. Finding text will operate on the current message and is like finding text in a Word document. If you choose Find Messages you can look in particular mailboxes, and search for text in any of the parts of the message headers or in the body. Searching in the body of messages is likely to be time-consuming. If you search for messages from a particular person, you need to bear in mind that the message header might contain either the person s username or their mail alias, so you might need to check for both. Deleting If you need to keep a message, you should file it in a mailbox. If you don t need it, you should delete it. Do not allow your inbox to grow too large. Not only is it confusing for you if you have too many messages accumulating in your Inbox, it will also make your client work less efficiently.

4 People sometimes want to keep messages only in order to have a record of their correspondents addresses. It is a good idea to keep a record of a person s addresses, but you should do it by keeping an address book, not by storing up all your messages. (See below for more about addresses and address books.) Filters Filters will automatically sift through your mail as it arrives or as it is sent, identifying certain messages and processing them in some way. You can set up a filter by specifying the match criteria and the action to be taken. In Outlook filters are known as rules. One use of filters is for those who are using two different mail addresses, for example a personal address and a functional or official address. A filter can determine whether a message was sent to the personal or the functional address, and can file it automatically into the appropriate mailbox. Another use is to recognise and discard spam (aka junk) mail. See the next section for a general discussion of junk mail. If you use a filter to discard junk mail, you must be prepared for the occasional false positive, which means you may discard a genuine message. Junk mail Junk mail, often referred to as spam, is a nuisance, sometimes deeply offensive; it slows down delivery of mail and makes it hard to locate genuine messages in your inbox. Junk mail can be dealt with at three different points: when the message arrives in St Andrews, when it is delivered to your mailbox on the server or when it is downloaded to your Mac or PC. Filtering on arrival in St Andrews: IT Services flags apparent spam by including the text {Spam?} in the Subject line. Filtering in your client: It is comparatively easy to set up filters within your client to screen out spam after it has been downloaded to the Mac or PC. By paying attention to the origin and contents of spam it is possible to create filters, which recognise a good proportion of the junk mail that people receive. The IT Services advice on spam is to ignore it and delete it, but if you find the volume intolerable, consider setting up a filter. If you have difficulty with this, contact the Helpdesk. IT Services does not routinely take any action to report or complain about spam, except in cases where its content might be considered illegal, or where the volume is such as to constitute an attempt to sabotage our services. Care must be taken when making complaints, since the senders will almost always disguise the true origin by forging the From field. To determine the true point of origin it is necessary to display the full mail headers. Many spam messages contain an offer to unsubscribe you from their list. Do not respond to this offer, because if you do it will give the sender confirmation that your address is valid. Another way in which spam-merchants can get confirmation that your address is valid is if your client downloads images from the sender s web site. You should therefore turn off the options for automatically downloading images. Forgery Usually, we look in the From line of a message to see who sent it, and usually what it says is true, but in case of doubt you should bear in mind that this can be forged. The full header information will reveal which machine the message came from, and in some cases this will

5 be enough to cast doubt on whether the apparent sender was really responsible. Remember too that when it comes to Hotmail accounts or other commercial service accounts, people can choose their usernames. You should not assume that messages from really come from Grouch Marx. The possibility of forgery (innocent or otherwise) is also present when people include other people s messages within their own, either in replying or forwarding. When a message says At 9.30 EST Lyndon Johnston wrote it may not be strictly true. Attachments Attachments are documents or other computer files, which are bundled up and sent along with an ordinary message. In order to open an attachment you need to have a copy of the program used to create it, e.g. Microsoft Word. If your version of Word is earlier than the version used to create the document, you might have difficulty opening the attachment. Always take great care when dealing with attachments. Often, they are not what they seem to be, and can be a common vehicle for viruses. Although all is now routinely scanned for viruses as it passes through the mail servers, individual users must still take care. You must keep your anti-virus software up-to-date, and you should never open an attachment unless you know who sent it. However, knowing who sent it is not enough, because viruses are often sent from an infected machine without the owner of the machine knowing about it. So, you must also know that the attachment was sent deliberately. If in doubt, leave the attachment alone and contact the sender. Once you have opened an attachment you should decide whether you want to keep it or delete it. If you want to keep it, save it in a different folder, amongst your own documents, for example. Sending mail Size Technically speaking, messages can be as long as you like, but you should try to keep them short. Some people find it hard to read extended pieces of text on a screen. Keep the paragraphs short and to the point. See the sections on replying and forwarding for some ways in which messages can grow unnecessarily. Subject Always give your message a meaningful subject line. Many people will delete subject-less messages unread, and the same goes for vague, impersonal subjects, such as Hi there or For your information. People might well assume that messages like that contain viruses. The subject line should identify the topic and if possible it should help to identify you as the sender, by some personal allusion. Most people ignore messages which say Urgent in the subject line. Attachments You should only send an attachment if it is essential. If you have composed the message in Word, you can copy and paste the text into your mail message rather than sending the Word document. Only send the Word document if it is several pages long or if it contains features such as tables or equations, which cannot be rendered in a plain text message. Another reason for sending a Word document as an attachment is if you want to protect it with a password.

6 You should always send a meaningful message along with your attachment, so that the recipient can know that you have sent it deliberately. If it is a large document (over one megabyte) you should ask the recipient s permission before sending it. Unexpected large attachments can disrupt reception of mail. Unless you know which word-processor (and which version) your correspondent uses, you should send Word documents in Rich Text Format (RTF) rather than in Word document format. Never send attachments to groups of recipients. If you want to distribute a document the way to do it is to put it into your web space and distribute the web address. If you do not know how to do this, or if you do not have your own web space, consult the Helpdesk. It is possible to protect your web space with a password, so that you can restrict access to your documents. Multiple recipients Often you will want to send a message to several people at once. Use this facility with restraint. You don t want to fill up your colleagues mailboxes with messages that hardly concern them. By sending a mail message to someone you are making a demand upon their attention, and you will make most people feel an obligation to reply, so think before you send. Consider sending a cut-down version of the message to those whose interest in the matter is only peripheral. You can distinguish between multiple recipients in the To: line and those in the Cc: line. Those who are merely Cc d might understand that they are not expected to take action or to respond ñ but whether they will realise that this is your intention is largely a matter of convention amongst the group within which you operate. Styled text You can include styled text in your message using different fonts, bold and italic, enlarged and reduced font-sizes, different colours, etc. This can be helpful, for example to distinguish more clearly between what someone sent to you and your responses to it. However, not all mail programs can display styled text, so you should not rely on it to convey your meaning. Your client should allow you to send a plain-text version along with your styled text, or indeed to send a plain text version only, removing all styles. You should choose one or other of these options, and never send the styled text version only. When sending to a mailing list you should send plain text only. Replying On the whole it is good practice to reply promptly to an message. It is so easy to send a reply that correspondents might wonder why you have not replied, and assume that their message has gone astray, or that they have offended you, or that something is wrong. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, e.g. if you are in regular contact with the person, or if the message clearly did not expect a reply. If you are only one among many recipients it is often difficult to know whether a reply is required. This is one of the reasons why, when sending a message, you should not copy it to more people than are strictly interested in the matter in hand. When you use the Reply command to respond to a message, the original message is included by default in your reply. This is often a good thing, but if you have been taking part in an extended exchange, your message might grow, with replies to replies to replies.

7 You should highlight and delete the unnecessary parts of the included message, such as the salutation and other polite or gossipy asides. When the discussion has gone back and forth for a while each contribution to the exchange might contain a signature occupying several lines each time. It would be worth deleting these. Similarly, you might decide to dispense with the older contributions to the exchange. Beware of the Reply to All command. The original message might have been sent to a group of people not all of who are known to you. Your response might contain material or might be written in a style that is not appropriate for widespread distribution. Always check who is included in the Cc: line of your message and delete anyone who need not, or should not, receive your reply. Apart from considerations of confidentiality, you should ask yourself whether all the original recipients really want to see your reply. Forwarding Beware also of the Forward command. Are you sure that the original sender of the message would want it to be forwarded to others? If you do forward a message, you don t need to send it all, you can delete parts. In particular, you should consider deleting references to the original sender s address. However, you should not pass off the forwarded message as your own, and you should plainly distinguish your own contributions from the original message, and avoid distorting the intention of the original writer. Priority When you send a message you can set its priority. You can say whether it is higher or lower than normal priority. These terms only make sense within an established convention, so you should not send high priority messages except to colleagues with whom you have agreed a set of priorities. If you receive a high priority message from a stranger you have no way of knowing what their standard of urgency might be. Many people either ignore the priority indicator altogether or deliberately put high priority messages to the bottom of their pile of things to do. Blind CC The blind carbon copy (Bcc) feature is useful, but there are practical and even ethical considerations to using it. If you are sending a message to a group of people, you might want to hide their addresses by putting them in the Bcc line of the message header, instead of the To line or plain Cc line. You would do this if there were so many addresses that the recipients would have to scroll down a long way before finding the content of the message, or if you thought some of the recipients would prefer not to have their addresses advertised. If someone uses the Reply to All command, the message is not sent to those who were in the Bcc line of the original message. However, it could be misleading if it was not made clear to the recipients exactly who else had seen the message. It is good practice to indicate in the text of the message if you have used the Bcc feature. A brief note along the lines of this message has been copied to my colleagues in the XXXX group or this message has been sent to all local users of the XXX software package will often be sufficient. Consider your correspondent Mention has already been made of ways in which you should consider the convenience of recipients: keep messages short, don t send unnecessary attachments, and don t rely on styled text to convey your meaning. You should also consider the feelings of your correspondent.

8 is often conducted in an informal way, with a casual attitude to grammar and choice of vocabulary, and sometimes even to spelling. Some people are not happy with this and in certain circumstances you should use a slightly more formal approach. This is particularly the case if your correspondent (or one of your correspondents in a message copied to several people) is not personally known to you. Even when writing to known colleagues it is advisable to avoid things that might cause irritation. Since you can t see and hear them, you don t know what sort of mood they happen to be in, so you can t tell whether facetiousness will go down well. If you must make a joke, ensure that it is clear that it is intended humorously (for instance by the use of exclamation marks or even smiley face marks). Some people find TOO MUCH USE OF CAPITALS too strident, so that is a device to be used with restraint. Confidentiality Remember that is not a particularly secure medium. It is possible for people to snoop on the network and pick up the contents of messages as they fly along the wires. That is something to keep at the back of your mind, but there are many less romantic ways in which messages can leak out. Unintended forwarding or replying is one way. Simple misaddressing of messages is another. People may pass behind you as you are composing or reading a message, and if you print out your message, it may lie uncollected on the printer for some time. For all these reasons, the common advice is to treat as no more private than a postcard. If this advice were taken entirely seriously, less use would be made of , with some inconvenience to the business of the University. However, if you do decide to disregard the advice, there are things you can do to reduce the danger of confidential information leaking out. Often information can be broken down into two or more messages, so that none will be fully comprehensible without the others. For example if you are writing about an individual you could omit their name from the main message, and send it separately in another message. In any case, when writing about a person, you should avoid putting their name in the subject field. If you are sending a document as an attachment, it can be encrypted and password protected. The password can then be sent in a separate message. You might decide that even this level of protection is insufficient, but in that case you need to consider the alternatives to . Passing documents around on portable media is not necessarily preferable from the point of view of security. Placing documents on a password-protected shared disk might be sufficient, provided you know who else knows the password. Signatures and disclaimers You can create a signature for yourself. This will usually consist of a few lines of text giving your name and contact details. Some people like to include a pearl of wit or wisdom in their signature, but this is not always a good idea. Some people feel it is necessary to include in their signature a long, quasi-legal rigmarole about confidentiality. It is not clear what these so-called disclaimers are intended to achieve. One common form of words includes the sentence, The contents of this message are not to be disclosed to anyone other than the addressee. If this were taken seriously it would prevent the addressee from forwarding of the message to anyone else, but this implication is routinely disregarded. Another common element of disclaimers is this: Unauthorised recipients must preserve the confidentiality of this message and should please advise the sender immediately of the error in transmission.

9 It is, however, not at all clear by what right the sender of the message can claim to place an obligation on the unintended recipient of the message. The general consensus is that these disclaimers are not worth much, and their main effect is to irritate the recipients. If you ask the unauthorised recipient to notify you that they have received the message, you must expect them to check the contents carefully to make sure it is not a spam message because most people now know not to respond to spam. The best we can hope for is that if our message goes astray the recipient will delete it and forget about it. Anything that that encourages them to examine the contents of the message will be counter-productive. Some people also include a disclaimer to the effect that the opinions expressed in the message are personal, not the official policy of the University. There is some sense in this, particularly if you are taking part in a public discussion on a mailing list. But you need to bear in mind both that messages can find themselves in the public gaze, and that even with a disclaimer, what you write in an , like any other aspect of your behaviour at work, could be taken to reflect upon the University. Addresses Don t guess the address. How do messages go astray? It does not usually happen because of any failure of the system, but through error on the part of mail-users. Sometimes it happens through careless use of Reply to All or Forward, but the commonest reason is straightforward misaddressing. Computers are very literal, and the sort of approximation that the ingenuity of human postmen enables us to get away with will not work with . You have to get the address right. So never imagine that you can guess an address. St Andrews usernames are usually based upon initials, and if you know someone s initials you might be tempted to think you know their username and therefore also their address. In this way a user with the username xyz is liable to receive mail intended for users xyz1, xyz2 and so on. We also use mail aliases made up of forename or initials plus surname, for example james.carter or w.clinton or j.f.kennedy. These might seem more obviously intuitive, but you cannot rely on guesswork to tell you which of these is used for a particular person. There may be several James Carters, one with an alias james.carter and the other j.carter. Address book and directory services One way to ensure that you send a message to the right person is to use the Reply command - at least, this is a reliable method so long as your correspondent s return address has been correctly configured. It might be as well to check that your own return address is set up correctly (in the Getting started category). You will not always have a message to reply to, so you need to keep a record of peoples addresses. Use the Address Book facility to record addresses. If you don t have an address book entry for the person, then if it is a local St Andrews user you can find the address from the University s Directory Services. Functional addresses In addition to personal addresses, there are a growing number of functional addresses in use within the University. These are useful, because the address can remain the same even when the holder of a particular office goes on holiday or leaves the post altogether. Once again it is tempting to suppose that the functional address can be guessed. In some cases this is so - it is obvious enough which function the address principal refers to

10 - but in other cases it is less obvious. Functional addresses have hitherto been set up more or less on request, and in a few cases someone has asked for a particular functional name, only to find that it has already been allocated to an entirely different function, which got in first, but which possibly had a less obvious right to the name. Mailing lists Mailing lists enable you to send a message to a number (sometimes a very large number) of recipients using a single nickname or a single address. You can create your own lists within your client, so that a nickname translates to several addresses instead of just one. If you create this sort of list, only you can use it. There is a possibility that a colleague may have a list with the same nickname but which refers to a different group of users, or which may not have been kept up-to-date when one of the group moves to a different job. This can lead to confusion and uncertainty as to who exactly is receiving the messages. Another sort of list is the public list, created on the server, which other people can use. The system we use for this purpose is called majordomo. Majordomo enables you to administer a list, keep its membership up-to-date and establish control over who can join the list, and who can send messages to it. Other institutions use different mailing-list systems, e.g. the listserv system. External users can be added to majordomo lists in St Andrews, and many St Andrews users belong to lists elsewhere. Whichever sort of list you are using, you should be careful what you send to it. Do you know all the members of the list? Will they all observe any requirement for confidentiality? Are they all going to be interested in what you have to say? When sending to a public list you need to be particularly careful about the points of etiquette referred to earlier in the section Consider your correspondent. All lists have a particular focus, and off-topic messages are usually frowned upon. Never send attachments to a mailing list of any sort. Miscellaneous Vacation mailer When you are away from your office you may find it convenient to send an automatic response (often referred to as a vacation or out-of-office message) to any s that you receive, telling your correspondents when you expect to return, and whom they should contact in cases of urgency. If you are an Outlook user you can set up your out-of-office message from within the Tools menu. This feature is not available to Thunderbird users. Viruses and hoaxes Although IT Services now scans all in transit to detect viruses, you should not allow your own virus protection to slip. You must keep your anti-virus software up-to-date, and also be careful not to open any attachment unless you know who sent it, and know that it was sent intentionally. The server-based scanning for viruses will occasionally make mistakes and identify genuine messages for viruses. You will be notified whenever an infected message is intercepted before reaching you, and if you believe the scanner has made a mistake you should ask the Helpdesk to retrieve the message and its attachment. If you receive a message from a friend or colleague warning of a destructive virus, you should treat it with suspicion. There are many hoax messages passed around, usually in good faith. Usually the only effect is to clutter up the network with unnecessary messages, but sometimes the warning will include instructions telling you to delete a file from your

11 computer. Don t obey these instructions, and never pass on warnings of this sort. A message that tells you to circulate it to all your contacts is bound to be a hoax. If you are in any doubt, contact the Helpdesk. When away from St Andrews If you are going away from St Andrews there are various ways in which you can keep in touch with your St Andrews , assuming that you want to. You can use the SARA service to dial in to the St Andrews network, and read your mail with the Outlook Web Application (OWA) from a web browser. You will need to pay phone charges, which may be high if you are outside the local call area. If while you are away you subscribe to an external Internet Service Provider, or if you have a computer account at some other institution, you will be able to use the Outlook Web Application to read your St Andrews mailbox. Large mailboxes You must not allow your mailbox on the server to grow too large. If it grows too large it can seriously interfere with your use of , and in some circumstances it can prevent delivery of mail to other users. Your mailbox will grow too large if you fail to read your mail for a long period, or if you do not delete read or unwanted messages from the server once, or if someone sends you messages with large attachments.