Fred Avolio's Musings

E-Mail Cleanup

While this series of articles is Mac-specific and Mail-specific, most of the tips offered can be used with other e-mail clients on other platforms. It is all about productivity. I know people who have no such scheme and are burdened by the guilt (or just stress) of hundreds (or more) unread or "undealtwith" e-mails in their inbox.

As the waiter in the 1971 television advertisement for Alka-Seltzer urges his customer, "Try it, you'll like it." Unlike the customer, trying these suggestions should lessen the need for an antacid.

See

Here are other excellent resources for getting a handle on e-mail. And, as you probably know, handling ths problem is very important. (See the comment in Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters, that says, "Even the beeps notifying the arrival of email are said to be causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.")

So, the additional resource:

Inbox Zero and
the Inbox Zero video.

Bother are from Merlin Man.

Writing

I like to write. I journal. I blog. I don't do either enough. I write, sometimes, for my day job. (But, writing for government contract deliverables—and who else even talks like that?—is something completely different, and can be life-sucking to a writer. But, I digress.) I just can't seem to schedule a regular time to write, and this bugs me. So, I need to find a way.

All that to point to an excellent column by Kurt Vonnegut. If I read this correctly, he wrote it in 1999. It popped up on a newsreader and I am pointing it out to you. It is How to Write With Style.

If you write, please read it (it is very short). His summary:

Find a subject you care about
Do not ramble, though
Keep it simple
Have guts to cut
Sound like yourself
Say what you mean
Pity the readers

Time Machine Failed Me

I'm disappointed in this "run it and forget it" thing. Others have seen this. Most probably have not. I mentioned it in Time Machine Error. Well, it continued to happen. Sometimes it would fail with a pop-up message saying, "Time Machine Error. Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory."

Very helpful. What am I supposed to make of that, let alone Mom and Pop or Aunt Ida? So I opened Time Machine and clicked the red "i" in a circle, assuming it meant "information." And that pop-up said... the exact same thing.

I turned off TM. I used Disk Utility to Verify and Repair. It would not verify or repair. (If you are interested, the log is here.)

Now, Disk Utility helpfully tells you, "Click Repair Disk. If the repair fails, back up and erase the disk."

Back up where? And why? It is bad. Why back up a bad disk. So, I have no choice but to erase it and start Time Machine captures again. Why? Why not? I am glad I routinely back up on another volume using SuperDuper!

Oh, and I need to select "Change Disk..." in Time Machine and pick the same, now zero-ed out, disk.

And I'm fairly smart.

Again, how could Mom and Pop or Aunt Ida do this?

Help on my Mac turns up a topic entitled, "Time Machine stops backing up to external disk." Promising? No. It says to 1. Open Disk Utility and 2. Click the Partitions Tab.

Funny. No such Tab.

Apple, this rots.

E-mail "Stationery": Just Say "No"

Short version: using e-mail 'stetionery' is evil. Don't do it.

In my posting Leopard: The Good Stuff I say

One feature Mail could have done without: stationery. Stationery is terrificfor hand-written mail. All it does is add an image attachment that may or may not be seen as a "background" to the e-mail. (Many times it will not show upit depends on the e-mail client. The user will then click on the attachment to see it and it will make them wonder why you send them a fabric swatch.)

I have repeatedly suggested against it every time someone has mentioned it in the Apple discussion forums. I've written, "As I've stated before on these forums, just because it looks good in your e-mail client does not mean that it will display correctly in someone else's. Sometimes the 'stationery' will be transmitted as an attachment. The recipient will get your e-mail and an attachment. They will have to click on the attachment to see it. And they will see the 'stationery' only. It would be like sending a postal letter with the words written on a plain white sheet of paper, and sending along with it a nice piece of colored stationery."

A friend sent me e-mail the other day. He "signed his name" at the bottom with a GIF image of his handwritten name, "Joe." It, was, of course, an attachment. It showed up fine in e-mail, but when I forwarded the message, I forwarded his plain text e-mail plus the attachment with his name.

Someone else consistently sends me e-mail with a fancy signature image, containing her company logo. Every time I reply—and include the e-mail—the fancy signature is sent along. She replies, and now there are two copies if it, and so on.

You, the sender, have no control over what the recipients' e-mail client can and cannot view. Sticking to plain text e-mail means that you can communicate with the greatest number of people. If you must have fancy fonts, and colorful backgrounds, send it in a PDF.

Plain text is best.

Use Rich Text if you must.

But, don't use stationery (unless it is in hard-copy, postal mail).

Data Classification

I provided some input into an article by writer Mathew Schwartz, who quotes me in the article Classify This! 10 Best Practices to Jumpstart Your Data Classification Program.

I've often pointed out, here and elsewhere, that there is, as the writer of Ecclesiates says, "nothing new under the sun." Mr. Schwartz wrote about this last week (and it is timely and too few of us are doing it). And I wrote these words in February 1999 (almost 10 years ago).

Security policy planning entails starting with the mission needs. Identify the crown jewels through data classification. Classifications might include "dont care," sensitive, financial, competitive, legal, privacy-related, etc.

Re-read my old article at Foundations of Enterprise Network Security.