Netiquette - Strategies to Acquire Creditability and Reputation as an Onliner - Part I

By: SOMNATH MITRA

Netiquette, simply put, is behaving appropriately on the net. Good manners are appreciated everywhere, in real life or in the virtual world. Apparently they seem to be really small things but to get your netiquette right, you have to get the little things right. Remember, every drop is responsible for the existence of an ocean.

We should follow certain common-sense net-etiquettes while communicating with others on the Internet. Let these netiquettes be observed whether we are writing an e-mail message, participating in a chat session, or posting a message on a Bulletin Board.

Well, the following are the basics you need to practice religiously in order to be taken seriously in your online communication.

Do not type in all caps. It amounts to be considered yelling or screaming online! This will surely make you to be perceived as lazy and being inconsiderate of those who will have to read their e-mail. A number of studies on the topic reflect that it is more difficult and takes longer to read text that is typed in all caps.

The ‘Subject’ field should not be left blank. The phrase in this field should be brief and concise pointing to the nature of the content in your e-mail. You would be actually helping the recipient by doing this as it would be easier for them to organize and manage their e-mail this way. Avoid using all caps or all small case, terms such as ‘Hi’, ‘Help’ or ‘Please Respond’, or the recipient’s name in the subject field, as you may be misidentified as a spammer, and your e-mail automatically deleted.

Formatting your e-mail with colored text and background colors or images in your day-to-day communications is not a good idea. This can make your e-mails difficult even impossible to read. Besides, formatting could make your e-mails difficult to reply to without having to go through a procedure to convert your e-mail to plain text first.

More often than not, when your recipients decide to reply, they have to deal with your formatting carrying over to their reply, which makes communicating with you unnecessarily more difficult. You can not expect people to convert your e-mail just to read and respond to you? Can you?

Please do not use large background graphics that take forever to download, especially if you have a dial-up connection (which is still the reality than most of us like to believe) is simply inconsiderate. However, if there is any compelling reason to use any type of formatting in your daily communications, do so sparingly. For example, if you need to e-mail Our Articles, send your e-mail in plain text.

On some rare occasions when we need to send a group of people the very same e-mail, as a courtesy to those you are sending the mail to, list all the recipients’ e-mail addresses in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field. If you designate an e-mail address in the BCC field, the recipient will get a copy of the e-mail while their e-mail addresses remain invisible to the other recipients of the e-mail—some or all of whom they may or may not know.

A long list of recipients at the beginning of any e-mail is an obvious pointer that the sender is either a novice/newbie—or does not care to respect other’s privacy. None of which, you will agree, are complimentary perceptions! E-mail addresses are very much like phone numbers. Only the owner of the e-mail address or phone number should be able to authorize who they want to have it and make it public to.

People do not simply like their e-mail addresses to be considered as public property. By sending mass mails to a list, you have made that decision for them—and that is a breach of assumed privacy when communicating. Let people decide who they will make their e-mail address known to—do not make that decision for them!