Module 2 email tasks

1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?
You can identify who the sender is by name or the name of their account, which domain they use (this could be an employer for example, company or institution name). Not sure about the path it took - will have to read up on this again.

2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all' functions of email?
CC - sending a copy to others would be useful for talking to several people at once, if you wanted to decide something as a group, or simply to keep other people in the loop for their information. But, not sure of the difference between putting all recipients in the To: field vs using CC?
BCC - wanting to talk to more than one person, but wanting to keep this fact secret, and to not publish the email addresses of others.
Reply all - if you have a group dialogue going on, e.g. planning an event, and want to keep all parties in the loop.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?
You could include in the body of your message the format your attachment is in and what it is called. Find out from your recipient what form of encoding they use and which application they will use to read the attachment. If you can't find out, send text files as plain text (ASCII).
Or use Rich Text Format (.rtf) as file format.
Use MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) as the default attachment encoder.
Finally, compress large files (zip them).

4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?
I have tonight asked my Outlook Express to permanently delete anything that has the words "data entry" in the subject line as I get bombarded with offers of this kind of work via emails. Looking forward to the result. :)

5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?
Also tonight I have (courtesy of the tutorial) set up two folders for soccer emails, as I manage a junior boys' soccer team and also play in my own team and sometimes get lots of emails regarding both. I can see it will be very useful to find things again - my previous experience of this has been to just view my emails by recipient, and hunt for things that way - usually successful, but it takes time. I will also set up something for our coming trip to NZ, as I have several emails from several people about getting together over the coming weeks, and it's a job to keep track of them all.