The Mathematics Department and its members use email extensively. Your mail generally is preconfigured to work smoothly (except spam filtering is off by default), but here are some tutorials to help you if you have difficulty.
The life cycle of an email message goes like this: You and your
correspondent have email addressses of the form user@domain, for example
jbruin@math.ucla.edu. At Mathnet your loginID is used as the user part of
your email address, and the domain (math.ucla.edu) is optional if the recipient
is also a Mathnet user. (Not for home machines, though.)
You use your Mail User
Agent (MUA, mail reader) to compose a message, and hit the send
button.
The mail is passed to a sequence of Mail Transfer Agents, and it eventually
lands in the recipient's system mailbox, also known as the inbox
.
The recipient uses his MUA to read
the mail. He may then reply, including part of the incoming message for
context. He may save the message in a separate
mail file (folder
), and in any case he should delete the message.
The bigger your system mailbox is, the more chance there is of errors that will scramble all your mail. If you save every message you ever received in your system mailbox, you are asking for trouble. Most mail is instantly forgettable and should be deleted forthwith; important mail should be moved to a separate folder, not remaining vulnerable to loss in the system mailbox. If your inbox has over 100 messages you need to improve your inbox cleanliness habits.
Professional email users, when replying, edit the reply text to retain only the context needed to remind the correspondent what points are being replied to. Also, the reply is inserted after the relevant context. Badly trained middle-school children just hit the reply button and jumble all the new content at the top, so the correspondent has to read through the entire maundering thread to be reminded of the context. Please reply to email professionally.
When you reply to or forward a message, show the replied-to message inline, not as an attachment, because some correspondents' mail readers are less than intelligent about showing attachments in this context.
Most MUAs let you choose between text/plain and text/HTML mail formats. Reserve HTML for web pages and send text/plain mail. It is easier for the correspondent's MUA to show correctly. Also, spam is often in text/HTML format (for advertising impact), and spam filters use the format as one of the criteria for tossing out messages.
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