The best thing about Using Email Effectively is how short it is: my experience is that the chance of most manuals, documentation or guides — particularly those aimed at beginners — being read is inversely proportional to their length. Another feature that makes Using Email Effectively accessible is the use of side-bars and short quotes to break up the text into more manageable portions. Despite its brevity, it does manage to cover all the important facets of using electronic mail, and I will definitely be purchasing a copy for my department and encouraging my users to read it: it will not only save me time spent answering queries about bounce messages and how to transmit files via mail, but will also ease my conscience about not doing as much as I might have done to educate them about email netiquette and mailing lists. Other topics covered include email style, the organisation of saved mail and the use of signatures.

Using Email Effectively also contains some mailer-specific material of a technical kind (there are examples from pine, mush, elm, eudora, cc:mail, zmail, mail, xmh, and mh). This could be a bit confusing for the novice, but most of it is in side-columns or separate digressions, and the authors always make it clear when they are talking about something applicable only to Unix systems or particular mailers. This material will help to give the reader some idea of the variety of mailers in use, something people who have only ever had experience of a single mail program often have trouble grasping.

May 1995

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