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Tag: email

Tech Tip: No More Emailing In The Dark

Tue, April 12, 2016 Published by

Today, more and more people are relying on email for communication. The obvious problem is that there’s no two way exchange unless they respond. So if they do not respond, you never really know if they read your email. Or if it was even delivered. Thankfully Outlook has built in features to allow you to know these things and even flag your email as very important. So if you’re only relying on email to contact someone and cannot call them via phone, you’ll have some idea of whether or not they received and read your email.

The first step is to create the email of course. After you have everything ready to send, look up at the top menu bar for a sections called “Tags”. In this box you can assign the level of importance and a reminder for you to follow up on this email later. The Follow Up will appear in your To-Do Bar with the respective time frame you gave it and assigning an Importance Tag puts a red exclamation point or a blue down arrow in front of the email for the recipient to see. For more options, click the little arrow at the bottom right corner. In this dialogue box you can check that you want to be notified that the email was delivered and that it was read. You also have a little more granularity on the Importance and Security of the message. The only problem with these features is that the recipient has the option to not respond to your requests. In which case you may have to pick up a phone. Otherwise, hopefully this will help you keep better track of your emails and the tasks that live in them.

I’ll go over delayed delivery next time.

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Tech Tip Tuesday: BCC Me… PLEASE!!!

Tue, December 22, 2015 Published by

I’m sure you’re all very familiar with getting emails that have multiple recipients in the address field. The typical scenario is sending an email to recipients who are directly involved in the discussion with possible indirect participants who are CC’d or “Carbon Copied”. However, when someone wants to share news or information they can get a little overzealous with the “To” list. Then when each recipient “Replies All” everyone gets a copy. Like a group text! Ugh! While there is good purpose and intent with the Reply All command in certain situations, an email with 50 or more recipients can become quite annoying to some. Not to mention how much email it builds up in people’s Inbox and in the email server database. Well there is a better way!

Bcc stands for “Blind Carbon Copy.” This means that if you add 20 recipient names in the Bcc box, each recipient will only see their own. Then if they choose Reply All, only the sender will receive a copy. As I said before, if you’re addressing a small group where each recipient needs to view the collaboration of the email, this is useful. But if it’s sharing some personal news or advertisement, Bcc is a good way to curb the potential Email Gone Wild scenario. You may also want to use Bcc to keep other recipients email addresses private to the group. Respecting peoples private information is very important these days.

As useful of a tool that Bcc is, you may experience a few problems. Bcc is widely used by spammers. For that reason some junk email filters may flag them as junk when an email arrives with the recipient name in this field. Making sure you’re on the Safe Senders list of whoever you are sending to will keep this from happening. Here on campus this will not be a problem. Another possible problem is using distribution lists in the Bcc field. If a recipient has any rules in place to sort emails by recipient, this will cause them problems. However, sorting is usually indicated where repetitive emails arrive for a specific reason. And lastly, many email providers limit the number of recipients to try and repress spammers. You will get errors and warnings if this is the case.

So how do you use this field? Each email client is different, including the many webmail options, but the CC and Bcc options are usually very obvious and easy to get to. On campus we use Outlook for email. At first glance when you open a new email you won’t see the Bcc option. But if you click the “To” button, a dialogue box will appear with the whole campus list of email users and distribution lists. At the bottom of this box will be the “Bcc” field. Use it the same way you would the “To” and “CC” fields. Maybe practice using it with a few coworkers or friends. So the next time you want to send out some cool info, the Bcc field will prevent you from becoming the origin of an EMAIL STORM! Lol!