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Summary: 10 tips to ensure your e-mail messages get read.

================================================================= Creating User-Friendly Email

For some people email is a blessing. It is now easier than ever to communicate with counterparts all over world at speed of light. You can collaborate on projects, review memos, and send updates all in stroke of a few keys. For other people email is a horrible curse. As if paper tiger on your desk wasn't bad enough, many people are drowning in hundreds of emails a day, all urgent, all needing your immediate action. Here are 10 tips to make sure emails you send don't add to your recipient’s list of headaches

1. Greet recipient in beginning of your message and thank them at end. This will set tone of your message. If you were to walk over to someone's cube, first thing out of your mouth would not be "Is report ready?" More than likely, you would say something like "Hi Bill. Do you have that report ready?" Show same courtesy when you're sending a message.

2. Make subject line of your message meaningful. The average manager receives dozens of emails everyday. Make subject of your email as meaningful as possible so recipient will know if they need to open right away or if it can wait until after lunch.

3. Mark your message urgent only if it is urgent. We live in such a fast paced society; it feels like everything is urgent. But if every email in your box was marked as urgent how would you know what was really urgent? The last thing you want is to be labeled as a person who marks all of their messages as urgent (ever heard of little boy who cried wolf:). There are 2 things you can do if you are concerned about your message being read in a timely basis. a. If your email service as this capability, place a return receipt on your message. This way you will be notified when you letter is open. b. Write in subject when you need a response by. This will help set expectations with your recipient. Example: West Lake Report: Please Review by 1/27

4. If you have an attachment included in your email, mention it during message. This will ensure that your recipient knows there is an attachment and they should contact you if they didn't get it.

We can break it down into two main parts.

First, as any of you that have been online for a while as I have, over eight years this month, you have no doubt shared your email address with other people on Internet.

Every single time you send an email message to anyone, your email address is made available to that person. Otherwise, how else can they reply to your email message?

Unless, of course, you are a spammer using stealth email software to hide your identity and real email address and domain of origin of your messages.

That is a whole different type of problem.

And how many times have you been requested to enter your email address at a web site?

Once you press submit, there is no way of really knowing who will end up with your email address and how it is that they plan to use it.

No matter what web site's "Privacy Policy" might state, you can never be certain how they will use your email address information.

The fact that I have used same email address for so many years and use it on my web site as a way for people to contact me, means that my address exists on every Spam disk or CD that is currently for sale on Internet.

We are all vulnerable to this sort of abuse. But there is indeed such a thing as "Secure Email".

One of best ways to control spam is to make use of FREE email forwarding service known as Spam Gourmet.

Visit this FREE service at: http://www.spamgourmet.com/

With Spam Gourmet, after you save and confirm email address where you'd like to receive messages, you can give out self-destructing disposable email addresses whenever you want as follows:

someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com where someword is a word you haven't used before, x is number of email messages you want to receive at address (up to 20), and user is your username.

If you receive more than 20 emails to that address from same sender, their email gets tossed into trash automatically.

This gives you a chance to establish real email contacts from people you want to correspond with and then transfer them to your real email address while eliminating all spam.

But, having a "Secure Email Address" is just one aspect of secure email.

The other part of "Secure Email" that is really important is ability to be able to send someone an email message without fear that what you have written in message will be exposed to unauthorized people.

For most of us, we could care less if what we write in an email message manages to end up getting posted on a web site.

For those of us wishing to conduct business online, that might turn out to be a blessing in form of free advertising.

But how many times have you been warned NEVER to send your credit card number and expiration date to a vendor via email?