A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Revision 2.0 -- Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

[Introduction] [What Makes Email Different?] [Context] [Format] [Page Layout] [Intonation] [Gestures] [Status] [Formality] [Greetings and Signatures] [Summary]
[Appendix A: Bibliography] [Appendix B: Acronyms and Jargon] [Appendix C: Domain Names]

See the list of alternate sites if this site is slow for you. There are also translations into German, Indonesian, and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)

You might also be interested in Finding Email Addresses or my upcoming book, Overcoming Email Overload


Introduction

I believe strongly in the value of electronic mail in both corporate and personal domains. Email is cheaper and faster than a letter, less intrusive than a phone call, less hassle than a FAX. Using email, differences in location and time zone are less of an obstacle to communication. There is also evidence that email leads to a more egalitarian information structure.

Because of these advantages, email use is exploding. By 1998, 30% of adults in the United States and Canada had come on-line.

Sadly, in the twenty-plus years that I have been using email, I have seen a large number of people suffer mishaps because they did not understand how to adjust their communication styles to this new medium. I wrote this document to try to help people avoid those problems.

This is not a document on the mechanics of sending email - which buttons to push or how to attach a photograph. Those details are different for every different email software package, and are better handled by manuals for the program. I instead focus on the content of an email message: how to say what you need to say. I don't think of this as email etiquette (commonly called netiquette) because I don't think these guidelines merely show you how to be a nice person. These guidelines show you how to be more efficient, clear, and effective.

This is not dogma. There will be people who disagree with me on specific points. But, if there was only one right answer, there wouldn't be a need to write this guide. Hopefully, this guide will make you examine your assumptions about email and thus help you maximize your email effectiveness. Then you can write to reflect your own personality and choice.


What Makes Email Different?

Electronic communication, because of its speed and broadcasting ability, is fundamentally different from paper-based communication. Because the turnaround time can be so fast, email is more conversational than traditional paper-based media.

In a paper document, it is absolutely essential to make everything completely clear and unambiguous because your audience may not have a chance to ask for clarification. With email documents, your recipient can ask questions immediately. Email thus tends, like conversational speech, to be sloppier than communications on paper.

This is not always bad. It makes little sense to slave over a message for hours, making sure that your spelling is faultless, your words eloquent, and your grammar beyond reproach, if the point of the message is to tell your co-worker that you are ready to go to lunch.

However, your correspondent also won't have normal status cues such as dress, diction, or dialect, so may make assumptions based on your name, address, and - above all - facility with language. You need to be aware of when you can be sloppy and when you have to be meticulous.

Email also does not convey emotions nearly as well as face-to-face or even telephone conversations. It lacks vocal inflection, gestures, and a shared environment. Your correspondent may have difficulty telling if you are serious or kidding, happy or sad, frustrated or euphoric. Sarcasm is particularly dangerous to use in email.

Another difference between email and older media is that what the sender sees when composing a message might not look like what the reader sees. Your vocal cords make sound waves that are perceived basically the same by both your ears as your audience's. The paper that you write your love note on is the same paper that the object of your affection sees. But with email, the software and hardware that you use for composing, sending, storing, downloading, and reading may be completely different from what your correspondent uses. Your message's visual qualities may be quite different by the time it gets to someone else's screen.

Thus your email compositions should be different from both your paper compositions and your speech. I wrote this document to show you how to tailor your message to this new medium.


Go on to
Context

You can send correspondence to ducky at webfoot.com but be advised that

  1. I get a lot of email.
  2. I don't get paid for this.
  3. I probably don't know the details of your particular email software.


Created 10 Dec 1994
Modified 30 Dec 1995: added introduction, shareware note, jargon link
Added mirror sites 3 Feb 1995
Added link to Business Netiquette International 28 Jun 96
Modified 29 Dec 1997: Removed the term "mirror site", after a new user pointed out that new users probably don't know what that means. Also removed the invitation to write me, as I was getting overwhelmed by email.
Modified 20 Oct 1998: Moved the mirror sites to a separate page. Removed the "shareweb" note, since almost nobody sent any money. Put cautionary note on my email address.
Modified 22 Oct 1998: Moved the bibliography to a separate page.
Modified 28 Oct 1998: Moved the copyright notice to a separate page.
Modified 30 Oct 1998: Minor tweaks to add new pages on status, formality, format, and domain names. Tweaked 7 Dec 1998
Removed redundant "post" 8 Dec 1999
Fixed typo 24 Feb 2000

Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Context

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Context

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

In a conversation, there is some minimum of shared context. You might be in the same physical location, and even on the phone you have, at minimum, commonality of time. When you generate a document for paper, usually there is some context embedded in the medium: the text is in the proceedings of a conference, written on a birthday card, handed to your professor with a batch of Econ 101 term papers, or something similar.

With email, you can't assume anything about a sender's location, time, frame of mind, profession, interests, or future value to you. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your receivers some context. This section will give specific strategies for doing so.

Useful Subject Lines

A subject line that pertains clearly to the email body will help people mentally shift to the proper context before they read your message. The subject line should be brief (as many mailers will truncate long subject lines), does not need to be a complete sentence, and should give a clue to the contents of the message. For example:
	Subject: need 3 thrombos by Tues
	
	Chris - I need three thromblemeisters for Thursday's
	demo in Boston.  They need to be left-handed, and
	they need to be packed for shipping by Tuesday night.
Here the subject line summarizes nicely the most important details of the message.

If your message is in response to another piece of email, your email software will probably preface the subject line with Re: or RE: (for REgarding). If your email composition software doesn't do this, it would be polite to put in RE: by hand.

	Subject: Re: need 3 thrombos by Tues

	Pat - I've got two thromblemeisters already packed
	from last week's demo, but I don't have another
	functional left-handed one right now.  Can you
	cope with two lefties and one rightie?

For time-critical messages, starting with URGENT: is a good idea (especially if you know the person gets a lot of email):

	Subject: URGENT: need left-handed thrombo

	I've *got* to have another left-handed thromblemeister
	for the Boston demo, and I need it by tomorrow
	afternoon.  Chris only has two, and I've got to have
	three.  Chris *does* have a broken leftie, so if
	anyone could fix that one, or if they have one in
	their desk somewhere, I'd really appreciate it!

For requests, starting with REQ: can signal that action is needed:

	Subject: REQ: turn in thrombos

	Pat's call for a left-handed thromblemeister
	turned up 12 functional lefties that were 
	lying around people's offices unused.  Please
	take a moment to look around your area for 
	thromblemeisters (rightie *or* leftie) that you 
	are no longer using, and get them back to Chris.

If you are offering non-urgent information that requires no response from the other person, prefacing the subject line with FYI: (For Your Information) is not a bad idea, as in

	Subject: FYI: donuts in break room 

	The donut fairy left a dozen doughnuts in the
	downstairs break room.  First come, first served!

Information, Please

Do yourself a favor and eliminate the word "information" from your subject lines (and maybe from the body of your message as well). When I was the webmaster for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I got a lot of email that looked like this:
	Subject: information

	Please send me information about UIUC.
This gave me very little clue as to what the person wanted to know about: admission application deadlines? The number of students? The acreage? The number of buildings? Was I supposed to send paper documents or give URLs? The only thing I could do with email like this was ask for further context. Mail like this would have been much better as
	Subject: UIUC history

	Are there any Web pages about the history of the U of I?

Quoting Documents

If you are referring to previous email, you should explicitly quote that document to provide context.

Instead of sending email that says:

	yes
Say:
	> Did you get all of the left-handed thromblemeisters
	> that you needed?

	yes
The greater-than sign (>) is the most conventional way to quote someone else's email words, but your email software may use a different convention.

Even if there are a fair number of words in your response, you still might need to quote the previous message. Imagine getting a response on Monday to some email that you can't quite remember sending on Friday.

	I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
	the other one before they make up their minds.
Your response would probably be the highly articulate, "Huh???" It would be much easier for you to understand email that said:
	> I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassembly 
	> ready; as soon as I get a decision on the 
	> thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go.  
	> Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether 
	> they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or 
	> do they want to wait and check out the right-handed 
	> one first?

        I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
        the other one before they make up their minds.
This is substantially better, but now errs on the side of too much context. The first three lines have nothing to do with the question being answered. You should only include enough to provide a context for the message and no more. (Peter Kimble, my high school computer science teacher, now gives his students the heuristic that at least half of the lines in an email message should be their own.)

You need only enough context to frame the question being answered:

	> Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether 
	> they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or 
	> do they want to wait and check out the right-handed 
	> one first?

        I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
        the other one before they make up their minds.

Remove Pronouns

The above example gives a good amount of context, but the response to it still takes a little effort to follow. A good rule is to look very carefully at all pronouns in your first three sentences. If they don't refer to something explicitly stated in the email, change them to something concrete.
	> Have you talked to the thermo guys [about which handedness they want]?

	I talked to the thermo group on Wednesday, and they 
	think the left-handed thromblemeister will probably 
	work, but they want to evaluate the right-handed unit 
	before they make up their minds.
Now the answer is very clear and specific. And, since the response contains implicit yet clear references to the original message, less explicitly quoted material is needed. Responses like this, with the context mostly in the body of the message, are the easiest to understand. Unfortunately, they take the longest to compose.

If you want to quote a sentence that is in the middle of a paragraph, or wraps around lines, go ahead and remove everything but the part that you were really interested in, inserting "[...]" if you have to take something out in the middle. You can also paraphrase by using square brackets, as above.

If the message isn't important enough to you to warrant the time to pare the original message down, include the whole thing after your response, not before. If you put the original message at the end, your readers don't have to look at it unless they don't understand the context of your response.

Summary

You may know what you are talking about, but your readers may not. Give them the proper context by:
Go on to Format

Go back to Contents


Created 10 Dec 1994
Tweaked wording 28 Oct 1998.
Modified 7 Dec 1998 - changed examples slightly
Fixed typo 24 Feb 2000


Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Format

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Format

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
The underlying rules governing email transmission are highly standardized, but there are a large number of different software programs that can be used to read email. It's quite possible that the message you send won't look at all the same when displayed on your correspondent's screen. You therefore have to be careful about how you present your text. This section will discuss the problems that may arise from a mismatch between the sending and receiving software, and show how to avoid them.

Fancy Text

Some email reading software only understands plain text. Italics, bold, and color changes will show up as control sequences in the text. You might send something like:
Hiya! Hey, I loved the presentation you gave to Jack this morning. Great Job!
but if your correspondent's software can't handle formatting, the message could show up as:
	Hiya!  Hey, I <I>loved<I> the presentation you gave to
	Jack this morning.  <B>Great Job!<B>

Web documents are particularly difficult to read with older email programs. You may have a choice of sending the web page as text or as HTML; keep your correspondent's capabilities in mind when you make that choice.

Extended Character Sets

Back in the dark ages of 1982, when the email specs were being written, the decision was made to encode email in such a way that only 128 different characters - letters, numbers, punctuation, and so on - could be transmitted from one computer to another. This allowed some free space for error correction - something important when computers were calling each other with modems.

However, the net is a different place now. Characters like ä, ç, and Ø are now important for large numbers of email users. So now there is a way of encoding data so that 256 different characters can be represented, called "quoted-printable".

Unfortunately, the underlying transport is still limited to 128 different characters, so the email gets converted to the more limited set, transmitted, then (hopefully) converted back on the other end. If the receiving software doesn't know how to do quoted-printable (or if something gets munged somewhere), the extended characters will show up as an equals-sign and two letter/digit code:

	La premi=E8re journe=E9 de nos deux voyageurs fut assez agr=E9able.  Ils =E9=
	taient
	encourag=E9s par l'id=E9e de se voir  possesseurs de plus de tr=E9sors que
	l'Asie, l'Europe, et l'Afrique n'en pouvaient rassembler.  Candide,
	transport=E9, =E9crivit le nom de Cun=E9gonde sur les arbres.

So why do you care? After all, you might not ever use umlauts. You care because there are "special" characters that you probably will encounter, that are NOT part of the standard extended character set, but which some software will allow you to insert. Even if your correspondent's software knows how to convert codes back to extended characters, different computers have different symbols for the same codes. For example, the trademark symbol, bullet, and "curly" quotation marks are all legal characters in both Windows95 and MacOS, but are in different places in the character set. For example, Windows thinks that character number 241 is a ñ, while the Mac thinks that character number 241 is a Ò. Thus you have yet another reason to worry about what your correspondent's email software is capable of.

Web Links

Some email reading software will recognize URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, or web addresses) in the text and make them "live". While some software recognizes URLs from the "www.", most software recognizes URLs by the http:// at the front. Thus, if there is a URL in your email, it is much safer to include the http://!

You should also be careful about punctuation - especially periods - right after a URL. For example, take the message

	Hi - The URL is http://www.webfoot.com/writings.html.  See 
	if you like it!
The software on the receiving end may think that that last period after the URL is part of the URL. Or, if the software doesn't recognize links, the reader may cut-and-paste too much. Either has the potential to lead to an ugly email exchange, with your correspondent insisting that the page doesn't exist and you insisting that it does. I will admit that it looks ugly, but it causes less confusion if there is at least a space after the URL:
	Hi - The URL is http://www.webfoot.com/writings.html .  See 
	if you like it!
People who are cutting and pasting might also select too little. Since HTML files can have either the extension .html or .htm, this can also be a difficult mistake for your reader to catch. To make cut-and-paste mindlessly easy for people, I try to always put URLs on a separate line:
	Hi - The URL is
		http://www.webfoot.com/writings.html
	See if you like it!
Yes, the period after the URL is now missing. Yes, this is ungrammatical, but I sure don't want to put it on the next line! I have found it worthwhile to trade grammatical perfection for easier cut-and-paste.

Some URLs are so long that they will get split into two lines:

	Hi - The URL is
		http://www.webfoot.com/advice/translations/indonesian/email.
	formality.html
	See if you like it!
If your correspondent's email software makes links live, it is probably not capable of realizing that formality.html belongs with the rest of the URL.
	Hi - The URL is
	http://www.webfoot.com/advice/translations/indonesian/email.
	formality.html
	See if you like it!
If your correspondent is cutting and pasting, he or she may not see the last bit. What you can do is put angle brackets around the URL. Some (but not all) email software will recognize that stuff inside angle brackets should be kept together:
	Hi - The URL is
	<http://www.webfoot.com/advice/translations/indonesian/email.
	formality.html>
	See if you like it!

Punctuation and Quotation Marks

Another grammatical rule that I usually break is the placement of punctuation. American grammar rules say that punctuation belongs inside quotation marks, for example the period in the next sentence:
	Bob said, "I love you madly."
That's fine when the stuff in quotes is normal speech, but can cause problems when discussing computer input. Consider:
	When you get to the password box, type "smiley."
Is the period something that goes in the password box or not? I prefer to use British grammar rules and say
	When you get to the password box, type "smiley".
This makes it clear that the period does not go in the password box.

I could switch back and forth between the two styles, depending on whether the thing in quotes was to be typed or not, but I would rather be consistent so that if the period is supposed to be in the password box, that will be clear.

If you can't bear to do such gyrations, modify the sentence so that there isn't punctuation there:

	When you get to the password box, type "smiley" and hit return.
or if you want to make it absolutely clear:
	When you get to the password box, type
		smiley
	and hit return.

Attachments

Some mailers support "attachments", where you can specify a document to send through email. This allows people to share essentially any file in any format. GIF-encoded images, JPEG-encoded images, Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Photoshop files, Excel spreadsheets, and executable files are just a few of the types of documents that can be sent.

If your correspondent has a mail reader that can handle attachments, this can work very well: a long attachment can be looked at later. However, if your correspondent's email software doesn't understand attachments and you send a non-text file (like a Word document, a binary, a picture, or even compressed text), be advised that it will appear as lots of garbage. Pages and pages of garbage, usually.

Even if your correspondent has email software that understands what attachments are, they still have to have software to read the document. Think of it this way: somebody can use the Post Office to send you any kind of document. But if you send someone microfilm, they probably won't be able to read it. Even executable programs can't always be useful to your correspondent. Macintosh programs won't run on Microsoft Windows machines; Windows95 programs will not run on DOS machines.

Furthermore, even if your correspondents can receive and view the attachment you send them, if they are low on disk space or dial in from home to get their email, they will not be happy to receive a 200MB video, no matter how funny it is.

It almost always better to post large documents on the Web and email the URL instead of the file. If you don't have that option, please email your correspondents first and ask them if they can handle a large attachment of that format.

Summary

If you don't know what email reader your correspondent has, play it safe. Also bear in mind that punctuation doesn't mix well with URLs or quotations of things people should type.
Go on to Page Layout

Go back to Contents
Go back to Context


Created 30 Oct 1998
Tweaked 7 Dec 1998
Added angle brackets to URLs (to help the client make URLs hot) 9 Nov 1999

Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Page Layout

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Page Layout

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Words on a computer screen look different than on paper, and usually people find it harder to read things on a screen than on paper. (I know several people who even print out their email to read it.) The screen's resolution is not as good as paper's, there is sometimes flicker, the font may be smaller, and/or the font may be ugly. Your recipient's email reader may also impose some constraints upon the formatting of the mail, and may not have the same capabilities as your email software. This means that good email page layout is different from good paper document page layout.

Shorter Paragraphs

Frequently email messages will be read in a document window with scrollbars. While scrollbars are nice, it makes it harder to visually track long paragraphs. Consider breaking up your paragraphs to only a few sentences apiece.

Line Length

Most software to read mail does not automatically wrap (adjust what words go on what line). This means that if there is a mismatch between your software's and your correspondent's in how they wrap lines, your correspondent may end up with a message that looks like this:
	 I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassembly ready; as soon as I get a decision on the thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go.  Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or do they want to wait and check out the right-handed one first?

Furthermore, the "quoted-printable" encoding also contributes to the line-length problems. If a line is longer than 76 characters, it is split after the 75th character and the line ends with an equals sign. People whose email reading software can understand quoted-printable encoding will probably have the lines automatically reconstructed, but others will see ugly messages, like the following:

	I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassemby ready; as soon as I get a=
	 decision on the thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go.  Have you=
	 talked to the thermo guys about whether they are ready to go with the=
	 left-handed thrombo or do they want to wait and check out the right-handed=
	 one first?

There are even a few email readers that truncate everything past the eightieth character. This is not the way to win friends and influence people.

You should try to keep your lines under seventy characters long. Why seventy and not, say, seventy-six? Because you should leave a little room for the indentation or quote marks your correspondents may want if they need to quote pieces of your message in their replies.

Terser Prose

How many times when you were in school were you told to write a 20-page paper? Probably a lot, and you got penalized for being terse. This training is not appropriate for email. Keep it short. If they want more information, they can ask for it. (Also note that some of your correspondents may be charged by the kilobyte and/or have limits on how much disk space their email can use!)

If you are sending a report to many people, then you may need to put more detail into the email so that you aren't flooded with questions from everyone on the recipient list. (You should also ask yourself carefully if all the people really need to be on the list.)

The fewer the people there are on the recipient list, the shorter the message should be. Books to thousands of people are tens of thousands of words long. Speeches in front of large groups are thousands of words long. But you'd tune out someone at a party who said more than a hundred words at a time.

I try to keep everything on one "page". In most cases, this means twenty-five lines of text. (And yes, that means that this document is way, WAY too long for email!)

Summary

In summary, keep everything short. Keep your lines short, keep your paragraphs short, and keep the message short.
Go on to Intonation

Go back to Contents
Go back to Format


Created 10 Dec 1994
Modified 5 Apr 1995
Tweaked wording and expounded on message length 28 Oct 1998


Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Intonation

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Intonation

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
The most difficult thing to convey in email is emotion. People frequently get in trouble for typing exactly what they would say out loud. Unfortunately, without the tone of voice as a to signal their emotion, it is easy to misinterpret their intent.

While you cannot make your voice higher or lower, louder or softer to denote emphasis, there are games you can play with text to convey vocal inflection and emotion.

Light Emphasis

If you want to give something mild emphasis, you should enclose it in asterisks. This is the moral equivalent of italics in a paper document.

Instead of:

	I said that I was going to go last Thursday.
Say:
	I *said* that I was going to go last Thursday.
Or:
	I said that I was going to to go last *Thursday*.
Which of the above two you choose depends upon whether you are adamant about the commitment you made or adamant that you didn't mean Wednesday. (Restructuring the sentence to remove the ambiguity would be an even better idea.)

You can also capitalize the first letter only of words to give light emphasis:

	While Bob may say that you should never turn it past 
	nine, this is not Cast In Stone.  It will explode 
	if you turn it up to eleven, but anything under ten 
	should work just fine.
I tend to use first-capitals to refer to things that are somehow dogmatic or reverential. This is probably a cultural holdover from all the capital letters that are used in the English Bible. It might not translate to other languages or cultures.

Strong Emphasis

If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation marks. Instead of:
	> Should I just boost the power on the thrombo?

	No, if you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat 
	the motors and it might explode.
Say:
	> Should I just boost the power on the thrombo?

	NO!!!!  If you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat 
	the motors and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!
Note that you should use capital letters sparingly. Just as loss of sight can lead to improved hearing, the relative lack of cues to emotion in email makes people hyper-sensitive to any cues that might be there. Thus, capital letters will convey the message that you are shouting.

It is totally inappropriate to use all capital letters in a situation where you are calm. Don't do this:

	HEY, I JUST WANTED TO SEE IF YOU HAD MADE ANY 
	PROGRESS ON THE PHROCKMEIJER ACCOUNT.  STOP 
	BY AND SEE ME SOMETIME.
People will wince when they read that email.

>>EXTREME!!<< Emphasis

If you really want to emphasize something, you can go wild:
	If you are late this time, I swear upon my mother's 
	grave that I will never, *never*, *NEVER*, 
	>>!!**NEVER**!!<< talk to you again.
Use this sparingly.

Mutter Equivalents

In person, there are a number of ways that you can indicate that a communication is private and not to be repeated. You can lower your voice, you can look to your right and to your left either with your eyes or with your whole head, and you can lean closer to the other person. While these obviously make it more difficult for someone to overhear, these signals are so ingrained that we might use them even if there is nobody around for miles. Unfortunately, lowering your voice and moving your body is hard to do in email.

I sometimes write what I really think and then write down the sanitized version:

	My boss got fired I mean resigned today, which
	*totally* sucks err.. will lead to enhanced 
	relations between Engineering and Test.
A friend of mine uses double parentheses to denote "inner voice", what in the theatre world is called an "aside":
	My boss resigned ((got fired)) today
	which is going to lead to enhanced
	relations between Engineering and Test ((in
	their dreams))
Something else that I will do sometimes to denote the "lowering of voice" is to type without any capital letters:
	psssst! 
	hey wendy!
	guess what?










	I GOT THE JOB!!!! :-D :-D !!

I should warn you that there is a minority that doesn't like the shortcuts I showed you. They argue that if Mark Twain could convey emotion without resorting to such artifice, then we should too. Well, I'm not as skilled a writer as Mark Twain, and usually don't have as many words to make my tone clear as he did. I believe that there is a greater danger of angering or offending someone by not using these shortcuts than there is of annoying someone by using them.


Summary

It is difficult for most people to express emotion well in a short message. Fortunately, you can use a number of textual tricks to help convey the emotion: Go on to Gestures

Go back to Contents
Go back to Page Layout


Created 10 Dec 1994
Modified 29 Oct 1998
Fixed typo 24 Feb 2000


Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Gestures

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Gestures

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Not only does text lack the emotional cues that vocal inflection gives, text lacks cues from body language. There is no twinkling of the eyes to say you are kidding, no slapping the back of your hand in your palm to show urgency or frustration, no shoulders slumping to display discouragement.

While you are unable to accompany your words with hand or facial gestures, there are several textual stand-ins for gestures.

Smileys

A facial gestures can be represented with what is called a "smiley" or "emoticon": a textual drawing of a facial expression. The most common three are
	:-)
	;-)
and
	:-(
(To understand these symbols, turn your head counter-clockwise and look at them sideways. You should see little faces.)

While people will have slightly different interpretations of the exact difference between the upper two, my personal opinion is that the upper one means more "I'm happy" and the lower one means more "I think I'm being funny". The last one is pretty universally understood as "I'm sad".

Typical examples:

	Hey, guess what -  I got the left-handed 
	thromblemeister spec done ahead of time!  :-)  
	I'm on my way to fame and fortune now!  ;-)
The second smiley, the ;-), indicates that you don't really believe that your boss will give you that big raise. It is similar to but not as fierce or trendy a rebuttal as a "NOT!" appended to the end of a sentence:
	Hey, guess what -  I got the left-handed 
	thromblemeister spec done ahead of time!  :-)  
	I'm on my way to fame and fortune now - NOT!
There are a wide range of ASCII gestures available to you, from ill (%^P) to angry (>:-<) to astonished (:-o), limited only by your imagination. There is a whole Smiley dictionary out there if you are feeling uncreative. (Note: I think that some of the Smiley Dictionary definitions of the basic smileys aren't a totally accurate reflection of the way I see smileys used, but your mileage may vary.)

Pause Equivalents

Imagine that you ask someone if you can turn the knob up to ten and a half. Suppose he says, "Well", then pauses for a long time, scratches his head, looks down at the floor, winces, grits his teeth, and says again, "Well", then pauses and says, "It might not explode". You'd get a sense of just how bad an idea it would be, while the text:
	Well, it might not explode.
gives less information. I like to use lots of whitespace and typed-out vocalizations of "I'm thinking" sounds, as follows:
	Weeeellllll....    errr   hem.    

	Wellll, it *might* not explode.
You can also use whitespace to make it more clear which words belong to which clause. For example, the following is very difficult to parse
	Did you want to use a left-handed thromblemeister or a 
	right-handed one with a half-twist or a Jackadoody brocket?
You could instead haul out your high school notes on outlines:
	Did you want to use 
		1. a left-handed thromblemeister
  	or    
		2. a right-handed one with a
				a. half-twist
				b. Jackadoody brocket

The only problem with using an outline like this is it invites people to send back messages that have nothing in them but the code for the answer they want, such as
	2b.
To avoid that, you can use a structure like:
	Did you want to use a
		left-handed thromblemeister
	or
		right-handed one with a half-twist
	or
		right-handed one with a Jackadoody brocket?
This invites people to cut-and-paste the exact, full thing they want:
	>	a right-handed one with a Jackadoody brocket?

Creative Punctuation

I tend to use a lot of punctuation in what I call "comic book style". Instead of saying:
	I am very confused and a little upset.  Why did 
	you give my report to Jack instead of Jill?
I would probably say:
	?!?!  Why did you give my report to Jack 
	instead of Jill?!?
The question mark is kind of shorthand for a furrowed brow or a "huh?". The exclamation mark is shorthand for amazement and possibly a scowl. The two together seem to mean astonishment.

There is a long and proud tradition of using punctuation as a place holder for swearing, e.g. That #%&#$(*! You will also sometimes see an asterisk in place of important letters, usually the vowel, e.g. That son of a b*tch! or That son of a b****! or very rarely That s*n of a b*tch!. (In actual practice, this form of self-censorship is rare; it is more common for people to either use the whole word or omit it completely.)


Go on to Status

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Go back to Intonation


Created 10 Dec 1994
Modified 29 Oct 1998
Fixed typo 24 Feb 2000


Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Status

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Status

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

Just as you have no guarantees about your correspondents' context, you can't determine much about their status. You can't look at their clothes, note their dialect and rate of speech, listen the timbre of their voice, or count the wrinkles around their eyes. Your guesses about your correspondent's age, race, gender, marital status, affluence, intelligence, and education will be much less accurate than they usually would be in a face-to-face or even telephone conversation.

Your correspondents can't tell much about you either. They will probably do the same thing you will probably catch yourself doing - make assumptions on the flimsiest of pretexts.

I am emphatically not saying that it is good for people to make assumptions. But because there are so few status cues to draw upon, they will. You need to be aware of that, so that you can work on guiding their assumptions if you need to.

Cues They Will Use

Language

The biggest status cue is your competence with the language. If you have lots of misspellings, your subjects do not agree with your verbs, or you use the wrong word, people may assume that you are uneducated. From that, they may infer that you are not very clever. It doesn't matter that the correlation between language ability and intelligence is weak (especially among non-native speakers); lots of people will make that inference anyway.

Furthermore, some people are literally insulted by getting email with errors, especially typographical errors. They feel that it is disrespectful to send email with blatant errors. (Note that you can use this to your advantage. If you want to flaunt your superior status, you can insert some typos deliberately.)

I realize that in a perfect world, we would all have the luxury of faultless writing. However, we do not live in a perfect world. Good grammar is very hard for some people, just as painting portraits, solving partial differential equations, shoeing horses, and sinking putts can be very hard for others. This has always been true, but before the advent of electronic technology, people who were not very skilled at writing could do most of their communication verbally. This coping strategy is less possible now.

Spending more time crafting prose can improve the quality of the writing, but it is not possible to spend an hour on each email message if you need to send ten of them per day. Fortunately, grammar- and spell-checkers can help enormously. If high status is important to your message, you should definitely use them. However, there are certain classes of errors that grammar- and spell-checkers will not find. If you really want to boost your language-related status, you may have to commit yourself to some significant studying.

Personally, I would like my correspondents to spend their time on providing appropriate context instead of on perfecting their grammar. I would much rather get email that says:

	There is 50 people with machien guns on Main Street
	abt 1 mi aways wallking north and they not friendly so
	getcher butts outta here protno!!!!!
than one about the same situation that says:
	You would be advised to leave the building promptly.
I can guess at proper grammar; I can't guess at proper context.

Return Address

Your correspondents will extract status cues from your domain. (If you aren't familiar with domain names, you might want to read the appendix on domain names and come back.)

Any stereotype that is held about the organization that gives you your email connection will rub off on you. For example, if your email comes from:

Your correspondents will also look at your real name (if visible) and log-in ID. Unless your name has cues to the contrary, most people will assume that you match the dominant species of your organization and/or country. People will frequently assume that bpj@thromble.com is male but that barbara@thromble.com will be female - even though barbara could easily be a man named Peter Barbara. Unless the name is something like Smith, people are likely to assume that the author of any email coming from Taiwan is Asian. Unless the screen name is something like Jamaal, people will usually assume that authors of email coming from the U.S. are of European descent.

Your log-in ID gives even more subtle cues. Having a desirable email name - short and without numbers - can indicate that you were one of the first in your domain to get an email account. Thus, steve@thromble.com has probably been using computers longer than steve9672@thromble.com.

People may also make assumptions about your maturity and formality level. Your correspondent will probably take Barbara.J.Periwinkle@thromble.com more seriously than barbiedoll@thromble.com.

You can steer people's impressions very easily just by telling them who you are. You can do this by adding a signature with status cues:

	Barbara J. Periwinkle
	Vice-President of Legal Affairs
	Itty Bitty Machines, Inc. 
Or:
	Peter Periwinkle
	Kennedy Middle School
	(Age 14)
	Check out the Latvian Homepage at http://www.latvia.org!
Here, young Mr. Periwinkle gives the cue that he might be of Latvian origin.

It can also be effective to lead off a message with status information:

	Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a student at Kennedy Middle School
	in White Plains.  I'm doing a project at school on imaginary
	industrial equipment.  Could you please send me the latest 
	thromblemeister catalog?
Or:
	Hi - I'm the Vice-President of Legal Affairs with Itty Bitty Machines.
	Could you please send me the latest thromblemeister catalog?  I'm
	considering purchasing stock in your company.
Note that here the author not only gives a title and professional affiliation, but also shows off language facility by using big words: "considering purchasing" instead of "thinking of buying". Overuse of big words can sound pretentious, but in short messages can enhance status. Be careful, though, that you use the words properly, and that they aren't so obscure that your correspondent can't understand them.

Email Usage

The final thing that people will look at is your use of email. If you do not give proper context, type only in capital letters, or use extremely long lines, people may assume that you are highly inexperienced with the medium. They may also assume that you are too stupid or stubborn to learn, since those are errors that are usually pointed out very rapidly (and not always gently) by experienced users.

In addition to the composition of the email message, people will look at how appropriate the message was. Was it sent to the right person? Was it a reasonable question?

Do You Need To Worry About This?

How do you decide how much time you should spend on managing your status cues? That depends upon several things:

Summary

Again, I do not endorse stereotyping, but generalizing is part of human nature. You need to be aware of what signals you may be giving your correspondents and how to counteract them if you feel they may be incorrect.


Go on to Formality

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Go back to Gestures


Created 22 Oct 1998
Fixed typo 24 Feb 2000

Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Formality

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Formality

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
It has been my observation that formality is used to indicate the inability of a correspondent to make a reply. Take three situations where someone is not free to respond:

Conversations involving people with exaggerated status differences and those to audiences that are unborn, dead, and/or large tend to use very formal language.

Conversely, intimate discussions use very informal language. If you used the same language with your spouse that you used with the Queen, your spouse would probably wonder what he or she did to make you angry!

Thus you can control to some extent how many responses you get to your email messages by how formal your language is. Because email is so easy to respond to, people naturally tend to use very informal prose.

The informal tone encourages your correspondents to respond. This can be a very good thing if you want feedback. However, if your email address is in a very public place, you may well find yourself getting far more email than you are interested in.

So be cautious about the tone of your messages. If want people to respond, be chatty and informal. But if you want to discourage people from sending you email, you should write much more formally.


Go on to Greetings and Signatures

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Go back to Status



Presented on 30 Dec 1995
Completely rewritten on 27 Oct 1998
Fixed typo on 24 Feb 2000

Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Greetings and Signatures

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Greetings and Signatures

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Every new medium develops its own protocols for opening and closing. Telephone conversations start with "Hello" and end with "Goodbye". Letters open with "Dear" and end with "Sincerely". Because email is so new, there aren't firm customs on how to open and close.

Many people do not give either a salutation or a signature. After all, while a letter can get separated from its envelope easily, it is difficult to separate an email message's body from its addressing information. The email message itself says who it is to and from.

However, that information might not be adequate for your needs. It might be difficult to find with some email reading software. It might be unclear or ambiguous. It might be inadequate for telling the receivers just why they are getting that message. Or, it might not convey the proper formality or status cues for your purposes.

I will give you my thoughts on openers and closers, but you need to think carefully about what you are trying to convey both explicitly and implicitly. You also need to take the culture and customs of all parties into consideration.

Greetings

Salutations

Salutations are tricky, especially if you are crossing cultures. Frequently, titles are different for men and women, and you may not be able to tell which you are addressing. The family name is first in some cultures and last in others. Honorifics may vary based on status or age. So don't feel bad if you have trouble figuring out which salutation to use: it is a difficult problem.

In the United States, it is an bad idea to use "Sir" or "Mr." unless you are absolutely certain that your correspondent is male. Similarly, it is probably safer to use "Ms." instead of "Miss" or "Mrs." unless you know the preference of the woman in question.

In the United States, using someone's first name is usually ok. Thus, you can usually get away with a "Dear" and the first name.

	Dear Chris:
Here you are covered regardless of whether Chris is male or female. (Beware of using a diminutive if you aren't certain your correspondent uses it. It might rankle Judith to be called Judy; Robert might hate being called Bob.)

If you are addressing a group of people, you can say "Dear" plus the unifying attribute. For example:

	Dear Project Managers:
Or:
	Dear San Jose Lasers Fans:

Do You Even Need A Salutation?

Given that email is relatively informal, frequently (in the United States) there isn't a problem with dispensing with names and titles altogether, especially if you are in a higher status position than your correspondent:
	Hello - I saw your web site and wanted to mention that I invented
	the thromblemeister on Feb 29, 2403, *not* on Feb 28, 2402.
I usually use a simple "Hi" for people that I already know:
	Hi - Are you interested in getting together for sushi next week?  
	I can bring all my wedding pictures and bore you to death. ;-)
"Good Morning" and "Good Afternoon" don't make a lot of sense with email, as the sun may have moved significantly by the time your correspondent gets around to it. "Good Day" sounds stilted to American ears (although it is common in other parts of the former British Empire). You may want to avoid "Greetings" in the United States: it reminds many people of the draft notices young men got during the Vietnam War.

Again, you must be careful about cultural differences. The East Coast of the United States is more formal than the West Coast (where I live). Germans are even more formal; they can work side-by-side for years and never get around to a first-name basis. Starting a message to Germany with Dear Hans might be a bad idea.

Identification

When I get email from strangers, I care more about what connection they have with me than how they address me. When you send email, particularly someone who doesn't know you, it would be good if you would immediately answer these questions: Putting some of that information in a signature is better than nowhere at all, but putting it at the top is better for several reasons:

Good answers to the questions can take several forms:

	Dear Ms. Sherwood: I am an editor at Very Large Publishing Company, Inc.  I 
	sat next to your husband on United last week, and he mentioned that you
	are interested in publishing a book based on your email guide.  I have
	read your guide, and would be very interested in receiving a proposal from
	you.
Or:
	My name is Dave Wilcox and I'm the legal counsel for Thromblemeisters 
	Direct, Inc.  We are deeply disturbed at the aspersions you cast upon 
	us and on thromblemeisters in your email guide.  Therefore, we 
	order you to immediately cease and desist using any reference
	to thromblemeisters in your email guide.  If you do not, we will be forced to 
	file suit against you or your descendants if and when we and/or 
	thromblemeisters come into existence.
Or even:
	Hi - I am a novice email user and just read your email guide.  I don't know 
	if you are the right person to ask or not, but do you know what the French word
	for "Mister" is?  If you can tell me the answer, I'll send you a funny postcard.

Some good friends of mine recently got email from my cousin for the first time. Unfortunately, not all of the email made it through. The message they got said only:

	Dear Rich and Chris: I met you at Jim and Ducky's wedding.
But, because he identified where he knew Rich and Chris from immediately, it was enough information that they knew he was someone to pay attention to. They replied to him and communication is now going smoothly between them.

Signatures

Many email programs allow you to set up a default signature to be included at the end of every message. Many people use these signatures as an easy way to give their name and alternate ways of reaching them. For example:
	Hi - when did you want to go to lunch?

	Rebecca P. Snodwhistle
	Thromblemeisters Direct, Inc.
	666 Beast Street
	Styx, HI 77340
	+1 (959) 123-4567 voice
	+1 (959) 123-4568 FAX
	snodwhistle@throbledirect.com W
	becca@thromboqueen.net (personal)
Such an extensive amount of signature information in contrast to such a short question looks silly to me. I think much of the above signature is extraneous. If they got the email from you, they can reply by email, so don't need your FAX number or street address. (If they have to send a FAX or package, they can ask for addressing information.) They already have one email address in the message you sent, and don't need your other email address.

The name is perfectly reasonable to include, especially if

The telephone number is also a reasonable thing to include - if you are willing to be interrupted by a phone call. Emotions are easier to convey over the phone, and some people prefer phone to email for all circumstances.

If the message is business related, including the company name is a reasonable thing to do - even if the message is going to someone else in the same company.

One thing that is missing from Rebecca P. Snodwhistle's signature, above, that I would like to see is her job title. Is she the vice-president of sales or the shipping clerk? That may have more of an influence on the correspondent than anything else.

So I would rewrite the above signature to be:

	Rebecca P. Snodwhistle
	Chief Executive Officer, Thromblemeisters Direct, Inc.
	+1 (959) 123-4567 voice
That signature is still overkill for arranging lunch, but it isn't always convenient to switch between having your signature included or not.

Some people put things purely for entertainment in their signature: artwork, philosophical sayings, jokes, and/or quotations in their signature. This can be ok, but don't overdo it. A good heuristic is to keep your signature at or under five lines long.

After setting up signature that is included automatically, it is easy to forget about it. (After all, your email software might not show it to you, or it might be so routine that you never look at it again.) So whenever a piece of contact information changes, make sure to revisit your signature to make sure that it is still up-to-date. And, if you have an entertainment piece in your signature, change it every once in a while. It wasn't as funny the fiftieth time your coworker saw it as it was the first time.

One final note on signatures: they are a good way to let your correspondent know that all of the message got transmitted properly. There is no body language to signal that you are "done talking" and, unfortunately, email transmissions sometimes get interrupted.

Separators

Many people put pretty separators - lines, horizontal bars, and so on - around their signatures. For example:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Rebecca P. Snodwhistle   | CEO, Thromblemeisters Direct, Inc.
+1 (959) 123-4567 voice  | +1 (959) 123-4567 fax
-----------------------------------------------------------------
These are very pretty to sighted people, but imagine what it would be like for people who are so visually challenged that they have their computer read their email to them: "hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen..."

Summary

If you are well-known to your correspondent, you can probably get away without including extra identification. In other cases, you should provide your correspondent with enough clues to figure out who you are, why you are writing, and why he or she should pay attention to you. Preferably, this information will be at the top of the message.

Greetings are difficult to do well, especially if you are crossing cultures and/or languages. In the United States, you can be pretty informal, but even in the U.S., you need to be careful that you aren't either making assumptions or using sensitive words.


Go on to Summary

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Go back to Formality


Created 30 Oct 1998
Slight modification 28 Dec 1998
Added caution about using lots of dashes 1 Mar 1999
Fixed typo 24 Feb 2000


Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Summary

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Summary

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Here, then, is my advice for good email style: Hopefully these suggestions will be useful to you as you start your emailing career! :-)


Go on to Bibliography

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Go back to Greetings and Signatures


Ducky Modified 10 Dec 1994 - added one line, money link

Modified 29 Oct 1998 - reflect added pages on status and formality


Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Bibliography

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Appendix: Bibliography

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Here are just a few resources that you can use to learn more about email. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and is something of a work-in progress.

Common Questions
Varied Collections
Style and/or Netiquette
Geeky Technical Details
Sociology
Security
Spam
Policies
Management Software
Scholarly Work

Common Questions

Here is more information on some common questions:

Varied Collections

Style and/or Netiquette

I lump style and netiquette together here because many authors don't distinguish between the two.

Geeky Technical Details

Sociology

Security

Spam

I have heard of but not yet gotten a chance to review:

Policy

I am occasionally asked for guidelines in creating usage policies. I don't make policies, but here is what I've run accross:

Scholarly Work

Occasionally people ask me for more scholarly/academic work. I don't follow the literature closely, so you may have better luck looking for "Computer-Mediated Communication" or "Human Computer Interaction" in your favorite search engine.

Here is what I know about:

Unknown

I don't know what these books are about yet.

Email Management Software

There are a bunch of companies developing software to help manage email. I don't believe this is an exhaustive list, but it will get you started:
These integrate email with more traditional call center software:


Go on to Acronyms and Jargon

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Created 22 Oct 1998
Updated, expanded, reorganized 4 Dec 1998
Added email management software companies 19 Oct 1999
Added Miss Manner's book 5 Jan 2000

Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Acronyms Jargon

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Acronyms and Jargon

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

A number of new users have asked me to include a jargon/acronym page for email. Contrary to how you might feel, there is not a conspiracy out there to try to exclude you. Every group that spends any time together develops its own shorthand notation; it is not surprising that people forced to use the unnatural action of typing would be inclined towards acronyms. Some of these come from Usenet newsgroups, some of the more "gestural" ones come from Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

Obviously it would be nice of seasoned users to not pepper novices with an enormous amount of jargon, but on the Internet, nobody knows you are a newcomer.

Here are some of the most common acronyms and expressions:

These are less common, but show up occasionally:

Jargon that is sometimes used:

A term that I would love to see popularized is "NRN", for "No Response Needed". Sometimes, without body language, it isn't clear when an email-based conversation should be ended.

To unravel jargon and technical Internet terms, see also the fine Internet Literacy Consultants' Glossary of Internet Terms. There is also a Dictionary of Computer Acronyms and Jargon. A simpler list is at Harry Yeatts' acronyms page.


Go on to Domain Names

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Created 30 Dec 1995
Modified 7 Dec 1998 - added a few expressions
Modified 28 Dec 1998 - added a link, "flame", and removed "MORF"
Modified 18 Jan 1999 - added bounce, distribution list
Modified 25 Jan 1999 - added bots, lurk, post


Please see the copyright notice. A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Domain Names

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Domain Names

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

How To Read A Domain

The domain name is the thing that comes after the at sign (@) in an email address, like aol.com or arc.nasa.gov. The domain names have different words, separated by periods, that indicate different levels of organization. The size of the organization increases as you go left to right. The domain arc.nasa.gov, for example, is for Ames Research Center, which is part of NASA, which is one of many U.S. government entities.

If I wave my hands and simplify just a little bit, the left-most word is the name of the actual computer that handles the mail. Small organizations might only have one computer that does everything; larger organizations might have multiple computers. For example, Ames Research Center email addresses currently all go through mail.arc.nasa.gov.

If you get email from someone, and there is no at sign (@), then that probably means they have the exact same domain as you. For example, if pat@bogusname.com sends email to chris@bogusname.com, Chris might see only pat in the return address field.

If there seems to be something missing from the domain name, then your correspondent may share some domain information. For example, if pat@uno.bogusname.com sends email to chris@dos.bogusname.com, Chris might see only pat@uno in the return address field.

Three-Letter Top-Level Domains

The last word, also called the top-level domain, in a domain gives a clue to your affiliation. In theory, this is what three-letter Top-Level Domains (TLDs) mean:
TLD Meaning Examples
.com Commercial business, a company ibm.com, att.com, ford.com
.net Network provider, Internet Service Provider webtv.net
.gov U.S. governmental agency whitehouse.gov, nasa.gov
.edu U.S. educational institution uiuc.edu, stanford.edu
.org Non-profit institution redcross.org, sfopera.org
.mil U.S. military army.mil
.int International itu.int

The three-letter top-level domains (except for int) were once exclusively U.S. domains. They are still heavily U.S.-centric.

Two-Letter Top-Level Domains

If there is a two-letter top-level domain, that is a country code. Here are some examples:
TLD Country Examples
us United States city.palo-alto.ca.us, washington.k12.ia.us
uk United Kingdom cam.ac.uk, tvr.co.uk
my Malaysia parlimen.gov.my, jaring.my
de Germany (Deutschland) sgi.de
jp Japan www.hitachi.co.jp, www.nihon-u.ac.jp
to Tonga netsurf.to
tv Tuvalu internet.tv
An exhaustive list of country codes is at http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/wwwstat/country-codes.txt .

Further Clues

Countries, especially the ones that are well-connected to the Internet, frequently have some meaningful structure in the next-to-last word in their domains. For example, ac is short for "academic" in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. Oxford University, for example, is ox.ac.uk.

Commercial entities frequently have co in the next-to-last word in their domain. For example, Hitachi Japan is at hitachi.co.jp.

United States two-letter domains usually have the two-letter state or territory abbreviation right before the .us. For example, the city of Palo Alto in California has the domain city.palo-alto.ca.us. (Remember that the scope increases as you go left to right: palo-alto.us.ca would be in Canada if it existed!) U.S. State and territory codes can be found at http://www.usps.gov/cpim/ftp/pubs/201html/addrpack.htm#abbr .

Children's schools in the United States frequently have the word k12 in them. (This is short for "Kindergarten through 12th grade", the U.S. terms for schools for students nominally ages 5-18.) Community colleges frequently have cc as the next-to-last word in the domain.

Universities in Europe frequently have the word "uni" in their domains somewhere, short for "university".

Canada also sometimes uses province codes; those can be found at http://www.cdnnet.ca/info/application-form.

The UK also uses

(Note that unlike in the US, "school" in the UK means ONLY pre-university institutions, what in the US would be called K-12.)

France uses

There are a bunch of subdomains that have been defined in the us domain, including:

These rules are not always followed. For example, the State of California uses ca.gov when it really should use state.ca.us. Also, some of these categories are extremely rare. I've never seen a dni or a tec, for example.

Now Wait A Minute!

You may have noticed that some sites that don't seem to match their extensions. The domain internet.tv is in Canada, not in Tuvalu. Why does America On-Line use aol.com instead of aol.net? Why is netsurf.to in the United States?

Basically, money. The countries of Tuvalu and Tonga have raised badly-needed cash by selling the rights to their extensions to outside parties, who then sell them to other bidders. (They think that the English word "to" and the common abbreviation "TV" for "television" are worth something as extensions.) And since .com is what people try first when looking for a company, many entities chose to use that instead of something in their country's two-letter top-level domain.

There are also some classes of organization that don't fit any of the domains particularly well. Individuals who want to put up a web page are not companies, nor non-profits, nor military. For-profit arts organizations don't fit comfortably in either .com or .org.

Take all domain names with a grain of salt. There are no penalties for taking a name in the "wrong" domain, so when people think it will get them some advantage, it happens.


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Go back to Acronyms and Jargon


Created 22 Oct 1998
Modified to add more .us subdomains Dec 1999
Minor clarification 24 Feb 2000


Please see the copyright notice.