Poynton's E-mail-protocol page

For many years, my e-mail address has been published in my FAQ documents (the ColorFAQ and GammaFAQ). Owing to unscrupulous business practices of SPAMmers, my mail server gets tons of SPAM, typically four hundred messages per day, of which about 99% are detected and discarded by Postini at my mail server, and a few are left for me to delete manually.

To avoid having your message filtered into oblivion when you attempt to correspond with me, you should do several obvious things:

• Configure your e-mail client to use a sensible and functional "From:" address, one that includes your name! Use upper and lower case - don't capitalize everything.
• Use a meaningful "Subject:" line, with some significant content. Don't leave the subject empty; don't just say, "Hi!" or "Hello" or "PLEASE READ" or "Notice"; these are ordinarily indicative of SPAM. Use upper and lower case - don't capitalize everything. Keep the subject shorter than 70 characters. Don't include any sequence of space characters.
• Don't send HTML e-mail. Use plain text. As a corollary, don't send images embedded in "rich text" email; instead, send images in attachments, but ...
• Do not send attachments, unless prearranged.

In the good old days, email transport was very reliable: You could be confident that a message sent by you would either be delivered or would "bounce" back to you with a diagnosis of a transmission problem. These days, if you fail to get a reply or a bounce, you cannot be sure that your message was delivered - it might have been silently dropped owing to inaccurate filtering. And people get so many forged bounce messages associated with SPAM that they can't afford to examine them individually - if you or I send a message that bounces, we may not become aware of that fact. So, if you don't get an expected message or reply, send a brief "ping" message, or better still, give me a telephone call.

Charles - links
2006-05-10