EXCHANGING E-MAIL in Software

Creating EAN 13 in Software EXCHANGING E-MAIL

Many e-mail messages that are forwarded around the Internet in good faith are actually hoaxes Sending these messages is unnecessary and fills people s e-mail boxes Often, well-connected Internauts (Internet users) receive these messages over and over, necessitating many clicks of the Delete button Many computer hoaxes tell you not to open an e-mail with a certain name In general, you cannot infect your computer with a virus just by opening an e-mail In any case, if you use the Internet much, you should install a good virus protection program and update it regularly with the latest virus definitions (see the section Avoiding Viruses later in this chapter) You should also check the web site of the manufacturer of your e-mail client and browser, to see whether any security issues have been found and whether an update of the software has been released to fix them E-mail clients that handle Java are at special risk You can check out a virus warning at hoaxbustersciacorg/, a US government site that has a good list of virus and other e-mail hoaxes Another good place to check to see whether a forwarded message is real is wwwsnopescom, the Urban Legends Reference Pages For information on real viruses, check out the Virus Information Library at vilnaicom/vil The following are some examples of e-mail hoaxes Please don t forward any of these, and verify any others before forwarding them: I Letters that tell you to send this to everyone you know Chain letters that claim to help you make money are always pyramid schemes and are almost always illegal I SULFNBKexe virus This is an old hoax don t follow its directions, which instruct you to delete a file that is part of Windows Ditto for the Good Times virus; there s no such thing I Virus warnings in general New viruses come along every month or two, and the disruption is compounded if everyone receives dozens of warnings from their friends and coworkers I Disney giveaway Disney is not tracking e-mail and giving away vacations or money Ditto for Bill Gates

For better or worse, some users of e-mail tend to enjoy shortcuts, including what have become known as emoticons (including smileys) and abbreviations of frequently used terms

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Smileys are punctuation used to portray faces or other pictures For instance, :-) is the standard smiley face tip your head to the left to see the face The standard use of a smiley is to indicate a joke when the text might not show that the author is kidding People use a whole range of smileys and other emoticons (icons used to indicate emotion, which is usually lacking in written communication) Some of the most common emoticons are listed at netguruscom/smileyshtml

Like any group of people, e-mail users have made up abbreviations to save themselves time and to confuse new folks Frequently used abbreviations in e-mail, as well as in newsgroups, mailing lists, and online chat sessions, include the following: BTW FAQ FWIW FYI IMHO IMNSHO NRN LOL OTOH ROTFL TIA By the way Frequently asked questions (Many lists and topics have a list of frequently asked questions and answers that they refer you to) For what it s worth For your information In my humble opinion In my not so humble opinion No response necessary Laughing out loud On the other hand Rolling on the floor, laughing Thanks in advance

You can find a far-too-complete list of abbreviations at BABEL: A Glossary of Computer Oriented Abbreviations and Acronyms, at wwwgeocitiescom/ikind_babel/babel/babelhtml

Five years ago, e-mail consisted solely of text characters, and the only way to send someone a formatted document was to send it as an attachment (as described in 7) Now, if both your and your recipient s e-mail support it, you can send formatted e-mail However, that s a pretty big if Older e-mail packages don t