Emails have become a standard form of communication. Nowadays, you can send practically any business or organization in your city an email, not to mention your friends and relatives.
Your teen may or may not have an email account already. If he doesn’t, he most likely will as an adult. Either way, knowing how to write emails and how to keep himself and his computer safe when he has an email account are important skills to have.
Below you’ll find some tips that can help your teen send good emails and keep his inbox and his PC fairly clean of bugs. It would be nice if you could keep spam and other internet nasties out entirely, but right now, that’s not really possible. So let’s settle for showing our teens how to reduce the number of virtual varmints coming to his email account.
Email Tips
Email is a fast and easy way to communicate with friends, relatives, and businesses, but it can also be a headache if you don’t watch what you type and click. You can make people mad at you (*sob*). You can get spam (ew!). Your computer can get infected with a virus (yuck!). It boils down to this: making the wrong move with your inbox can add hours of work to your day that you didn’t want. You can avoid some of these hassles by following these tips.
Writing Personal Emails
One of the best parts about email is that you can communicate with you friends and relatives in a quick, convenient way, but it’s important to take into consideration the feelings of the other person when you type.
Be careful what you say. Remember, the person getting the email can’t see your face, so be careful how you phrase things. Use emoticons when it seems appropriate to clarify what you mean. Reread your email before you send it to make sure that nothing you say could be interpreted badly.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you don’t want to be gossiped about, don’t gossip about others. If you are positive and polite with others, they will more than likely be positive and polite with you.
Apologize when something goes wrong. If the recipient of an email misinterprets something you wrote or if you said something wrong, write back with an apology and (if necessary) clarification. You’ll feel better about yourself if you do.
Writing Business Emails
Emailing a business can be a little intimidating, but if you keep these tips in mind, it will be a much easier task.
Start with your objective. Why are you emailing this company? Do you need to request something or share some information? Think about this first, then the rest will flow when you write the email.
Be positive and polite. Remember, you can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar. You’re more likely to get your needs fulfilled if you treat the person you’re emailing with respect.
Be short and to the point. You don’t need to tell this business your life story. Just ask what you need to ask or tell them what you need to tell them.
Email Safety
If you aren’t careful, email can bring nasty stuff to your computer. Here are some tips that will help you avoid getting viruses and spam. (The email kind that is. If you don’t like the spam in a can, you’ll have to talk to your mother about that one.)
Use safe passwords for your email account. Passwords should be long and use not only letters, but numbers and special characters like exclamation points and percent signs as well.
Don’t share your passwords. With the exception of your parents or some other responsible adult, you shouldn’t share your passwords with anyone. This includes your best friends. While they may be your friends today, they may not be tomorrow and they can wreak havoc on your account if they have your password.
Be sure to log out of your email account after checking it on public wi-fi (coffee shop, library, etc.). Or better yet, don’t check it in these public hotspots at all. These tend to be vulnerable to hacker attacks.
Don’t share important personal and financial information in an email. Email accounts can be hacked (broken into) and emails can be hijacked (a hacker can intercept your email) so don’t put any private stuff like bank or credit card information or your social security number in an email.
Don’t open attachments unless you know what they are. Viruses can be hidden in attachments, even those innocent looking inspirational or Christian ones that go around the web. It’s sad to say, but there are people out there who will send out these inspirational emails with Trojan viruses attached. These emails will then get forwarded to people’s friends and relatives all over the world. And speaking of forwarded emails…
Try to avoid forwarded emails. Tell your friends that you don’t accept them. Why? Well, let me tell you what happens with these. Let’s say your friend forwards an email to you and other friends. Your email address is now in this message. I’m sure you’ve probably noticed a huge list of email addresses at the beginning of these little gems. Well, yours is now in there too. Your friend’s friends will then forward it to more friends and so on. The list of email addresses grows and the forwarded email goes around the world. Finally, some spammer or hacker gets it and guess what? He now has a list of email addresses that he can use to spam or hack including yours. Lovely, huh? So try to avoid these types of emails. If you HAVE to forward something, take these two steps before sending the message on:
- Delete all of the addresses at the top of the email.
- Use the Bcc (blind carbon copy) feature in the To: section of the email. This hides everyone’s email address that you input.
Don’t do chain emails. Just like with forwarded message, chain mails can get to hackers and spammers.
Be careful which newsletters you sign up for. Make sure the company is reputable. Also, for the newsletter to be legit, there should be some kind of privacy policy or anti-spam statement somewhere in the sign up box.
Watch out for unusual emails. If you get an email from a friend recommending some company, it may not be from your friend. Someone could have hacked into his account and sent it. Contact your friend in a separate email and ask about it.
If you do get spam, report it or file it under spam. Your email should have someplace like a spam folder or a “Report Spam” feature. Using this will make your email service smarter and help it to identify future spam. Whatever you do, don’t open the spam message. Trash it instead.