Amazon.com Review
Exchanging e-mail with friends and coworkers is one of the simple pleasures of online life. E-mail becomes complex, though, when you go beyond communicating with a small group of people. In
Effective E-Mail, Bradley Shimmin makes the complexities simple again. He avoids a manual-like approach by focusing first on common e-mail problems and then on productive e-mail techniques. An introductory chapter discusses general e-mail techniques, assorted file formats and their uses, and file compression and decompression tools and their uses.
Shimmin then discusses the various approaches to encoding and decoding, which is the way pictures, sounds, and other nontext files are sent by e-mail. He covers strategies for getting mail to and from nonstandard systems, techniques that can make e-mail a high-powered communications tool, methods for tracking down the e-mail addresses of those you want to communicate with, and ways to supercharge e-mail operations. He also describes how to tweak software settings to organize e-mail files, work efficiently with multiple recipients, and prioritize mail. In the chapter entitled "The Seedy Side of Email," Shimmin discusses how to ward off junk e-mail and deal with serious offenders. He tells you how to handle "e-mail bombs," (which fill up mailboxes) and protect against computer viruses. Those sending confidential communications will appreciate the chapter on encryption and e-mail privacy. Shimmin closes with other online topics, such as online meetings and one-on-one collaboration, before providing an appendix full of e-mail resources. An enclosed CD-ROM provides most of the important software tools discussed in the book.
About the Author
As the Technical Analyst for
LAN Times Magazine, Bradley F. Shimmin has authored innumerable articles, created PARTS (a Website dedicated to component software), and co-authored several books, including the
LAN Times Guide to Networking Windows 95 and the
LAN Times Guide to Interoperability. In some of Mr. Shimmin's past lives, he has been a systems administrator, a computer book Acquisitions Editor, and a certified Ski Bum.
