9 things I wished everyone knew about email

1. Change your settings so that email from you has a name, your name, not a blank or some unusual characters, in the from field. (ask a geek or IT person for help if you don't know how).
2. Change your settings so that the bottom of every email includes a signature (often called a sig) that includes your name and your organization.
3. Change your settings so that when you reply to a note, the note you're replying to is included below what you write (this is called quoting).
4. When you decide you want to email me and the other 10K people in your address book, use BCC!  Blind Carbon Copy... This means that When I read my email, I am not going to see 99,999 other peoples email address's because number 5...
5. Don't hit reply all. Just don't. Okay, you can... but someone that emailed those 10K people above all 10K people are going to get your reply!
6. You can't recall an email you didn't mean to send. Some software makes you think you can, but you can't. Not reliably.
7. Email lives forever, is easy to spread and can easily show up in discovery for a lawsuit.
8. Please don't ask me to save a tree by not printing your email. It doesn't work, it just annoys the trees.
9. Send yourself some email at a friend's computer. Read it. Are the fonts too big or too small? Does it look like a standard email? If it doesn't look like a standard, does this deviation help you or hurt you? Sometimes, fitting in makes sense, no?

And a bonus tip from Cory Doctorow, who gets more email than you and me combined: When you go on vacation, set up an autoreply that says, "I'm on vacation until x/x/2010. When I get back, I'm going to delete all the email that arrived while I was gone, so if this note is important, please send it to me again after that date."