Using Formatted or Fancy Email

I'm sure you've all received an occasional e-mail message that contains some symbols that make the e-mail message hard to read. This occurs because the sender is using symbols that don't translate well into the simple language of the Internet. For example, many people compose e-mail messages in a fancy word processing program that uses smart (curly) quotes, dash symbols, fractions not typed in manually, tabs, etc. These often convert to gibberish on the Internet.

The following illustrates how special characters can turn to "mush" at the receiving person's end -- making a message harder to read...

The following illustrates how special characters can turn to ’mushâ€" at the receiving person=92s end =4G making a message harder to read=9R

The "Internet-safe" way to format this same paragraph that will reduce the likelihood of "mush" is as follows:

The following illustrates how special characters can turn to "mush" at the receiving
person's end -- making a message harder to read...

To avoid this confusion at the receiving end, use the following guidelines when composing or editing your e-mail:

1. Avoid smart quotes -- quotation marks that curl in toward the letters.

2. Avoid "em dash" or "en dash" (medium and long dash symbols)

3. Avoid use of TABs and INDENTs

4. Avoid cute ASCII pictures made with keyboard symbols since these usually appear garbled on most e-mail software that displays text in proportional format rather than fixed format

5. Avoid all special symbols not readily available on the keyboard. Even some keyboard symbols such as the = and + and some others will not transfer properly over the Internet. Although they may appear fine when you compose the e-mail message, some recipients will see these characters converted to a to gibberish. For example a = character occasionally converts to something like =3D.

6. Avoid use of colored text.

7. Avoid use of formatted text (bold, underline, italic, etc.)

8. Avoid use of email stationary. In addition to causing problems with some of your recipients, these emails become very large.

Also, note the following:

1. Use word-wrap wherever possible in multi-line paragraphs, allowing text to flow to new lines automatically.

2. If you do press the ENTER key at the end of a line to force a new line, be sure that (a) there is no space at the end of the line BEFORE the ENTER key is pressed, and (b) the text line leading up to the ENTER key is no longer than 4 inches.