A Beginners Guide to Effective Email
Bibliography

Common Questions

• Finding Email Addresses by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
• Is Electronic Mail More Like Speech or More Like Writing? by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
• Can I Use Outlook or Outlook Express with AOL? by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

• Mary Houten-Kemp's site, Everything E-Mail, lives up to its name.

• Heinz Tschabitscher runs About.com's email site, and does so very well. His site has quite a lot of very good, well-organized information on it.
  Google's Email Help and Tutorials site is a bit more focused.

• Jacobe Palme has a small review of email books.

• The Internet Business Forum has a very professional set of Email Tips and Techniques.

• Wingra has a nice list of links. It covers mostly techie-type things - protocols, standards - but there is a pretty comprehensive list of industry magazines as well.

• Adam Cogan of Superior Software for Windows wrote up some Rules to Better Email. I have some subtle disagreements with a few of the details of his rules, but on the whole they are very good.

• There are a bunch of catch-all books that have a chapter or two on style/etiquette issues, but which tend to talk a lot about what email is, why it is wonderful, what features it has, and how to push the right buttons and pull down the right menus, using one or more of the emailers of the time to illustrate the concepts. These include:
  • E-Mail for Dummies by John R. Levine (and a bunch of others) covers a whole collection of email software and services.
    IDG, 1997; ISBN: 0764501313; 300 pages

  • Using Email Effectively by Linda Lamb using the Unix mailx email reader in the examples.
    O'Reilly and Associates, 1995; ASIN: 1565921038

  • Using E-Mail, by Dave Gibbons and four others, covering a whole bunch of email programs.
    Que, 1994; ISBN: 0-7897-0023-9

  • The E-Mail Companion: Communicating Effectively via the Internet and Other Global Networks by John Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell, using the Unix pine email reader.
    Addison-Wesley, 1994; ISBN: 0201406586

  • There are also some interesting articles and books about the differences between oral and literate societies and the difference between post-printing press and "scribal" societies. I've got those in a separate bibliography.

Style and/or Netiquette

• I Will Follow... covers a lot of the same material that my guide covers, but not in as much detail.

• Paul McFedries has an email primer that is quite nice.

• Albion.com has the Netiquette Home Page, which has excerpts from the book Netiquette by Virginia Shea. The book is very thorough on how to be a nicer person, and tends to have a Usenet-oriented focus.
  Albion Books, 1994; ISBN: 0963702513

• Tips on E-mail Netiquette
• Harvard Business School Publishing The Ten Commandments of E-Mail
• Electronic Mail Etiquette (David Harris)
• Avoiding the Dark Side of Email by Jim Britell is a thoughtful essay on the dangers of miscommunication in email and how to properly convey your message.
• Roadmap by Rev. Bob Crispen talks about how to avoid flame wars.
• The book Elements of E-mail Style by David Angell and Brent Heslop is an excellent book with a slightly different purpose from my guide. They talk about style a little bit, but most of the pages cover what I think of as "language mechanics" - spelling, sentence structure, punctuation, and so on.
  Addison-Wesley Pub Co, 1994; ISBN: 0201627094; 157 pages

• E-Writing: 21st Century Tools for Effective Communication by Dianna Booher is similar to Elements of E-mail Style, but bigger and thicker. 314 of its 370 pages are devoted to writing -- on paper or in email.
  Pocket Books, 2001; ISBN: 0743412583; 368 pages

• There is a classic, tongue-in-cheek guide of what not to do at Dear Emily Postnews.

• Writing Effective E-Mail by Nancy Flynn and Tom Flynn is really kind of a workbook. It looks like it is good for use with a live training class. I don't agree with some of their statements about how important grammar is nor that email is no different than letters. They do cover all the basics briefly but pretty well.
  Crisp Publications, 1998; ISBN: 1-56052-515-0; 82 pages

• If you read A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email, you'll be bored by E-Mail Essentials by Robert S. Want, as about half of it is A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email. (I put the Beginner's Guide into the public domain, so yes, he can do that.)

• Better, Faster Email: Getting the Most Out of Email by Joan Tunstall is a grab-bag of all kinds of email topics, including when to use email vs. phone, security, and finding mailing lists, and maintaining your address book.
  Allen & Unwin; April 1999; ISBN 1864488999; 192 pages

  Easy Email, also by Joan Tunstall, is basically a very small, abridged version of Better, Faster Email.
  Allen & Unwin; 2000; ISBN 1865082945; 192 pages

• Collections of emoticons can be found at:
  • SmileyDictionary.com
  • The Unofficial Smiley Dictionary
  • Helwig's Smiley Dictionary.
  There are also two books on emoticons:
  Smileys by Dougherty Sanderson and David W. Sanderson
  O'Reilly & Associates, 1993; ISBN: 1565920414; 93 pages
  and
  The Smiley Dictionary by Seth Godin
  Peachpit, 1993; ISBN: 1-56609-008-3; 73 pages

• Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age talks about issues that The Chicago Manual of Style doesn't cover yet: things like how to cite a web page, how to spell email, etc. Somebody had to write a spec for the language, and I guess they were as good an outfit as any to write it. Be aware that they talk about how to translate net concepts to paper, not how to translate paper concepts to electronic media. Furthermore, most of the book is a huge glossary.
  HardWired, 1997; ISBN: 1888869011; 158 pages

• Why Didn't You Say That in the First Place? : How to Be Understood at Work by Richard Heyman. I haven't read this one yet, but it looks like a good book on paper document style issues.
  Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997; ISBN: 0787903442 ; 192 pages