E-mail & The Tanning Salon

E-mail &The Tanning Salon

by Scott Hoover

Electronic mail (e-mail) is part of the Internet, but not specifically part of the World Wide Web. Indeed, when you take into account businesses, more people use e-mail than use the Web. Simply defined, e-mail is the process of sending and receiving messages electronically.

More For Less

One of the great values with e-mail is the nominal cost. The cost of mailing a letter is 33 cents, in addition to the paper and envelope. The cost of communicating long distance by telephone varies, but is upward of 10 cents per minute, and the ease of dialing a phone number can be offset by obstacles including different time zones, voice mail and verbal misunderstandings. However, e-mail, no matter how many or how far it has to go, is free.

A second great value of e-mail is its near real-time communication. In most instances, within seconds after sending a message, it is available to be downloaded by the recipient. However, because in some instances servers batch process e-mails, it may lead to a delay. In addition, as with mail, some messages disappear, never to be delivered.

Electronic mail is sent using an e-mail program that can be acquired for nothing or next to nothing. Currently, there are a number of programs available including Internet Explorer's Outlook Express (free), Netscape Messenger (free) and Eudora Lite (free). In addition, for the sake of convenience and compatibility, it makes great sense to use the e-mail program included with your favorite browser. However, make the right choice early because most e-mail programs make it difficult to export your address list to a competing e-mail program.

It is necessary to have an e-mail address in order to receive e-mail. Basically, there are three ways to obtain an e-mail address. The first is to use your dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP). The second is to use a Web-based e-mail service. And, the third is to use your own domain name.

In many ways, an e-mail address should be looked upon the same as a phone number. You want it to be easy to remember and you do not want it to change once it is published. Also similar to a phone number, an e-mail address has a fixed format. It is always: username@domainname. For example, if your domain name is goldenbrown.com and your user name is tan, your e-mail address would be tan@goldenbrown.com, which reads: "tan at golden brown dot com."

Using your ISP is quite affordable since e-mail almost always is included in the package price of Web browsing and newsgroups. Most ISPs will construct your e-mail address like the following: youraccountname@theISPname.com. This works fine provided you intend never to switch ISPs. Unlike a phone number, which you keep when switching long distance carriers, an e-mail address using the ISP domain name only works while you maintain an account with the ISP. Consider this carefully before committing an e-mail address to collateral print materials.

In addition, there are a number of services that offer free permanent Web-based e-mail addresses; however, you can expect to see extra advertising as a result of the service being free. Bigfoot Partners (www.bigfoot.com) and iName (www.iname.com) both offer permanent names with free forwarding to wherever you happen to be at the time, just like a forwarding address or a call forward option on a phone number. These services protect users who switch ISPs.

The third way to establish an e-mail address is by first having a domain name. Once registered, a domain name is yours forever, provided you pay an annual renewal fee. All professional Web host companies have automatic e-mail forwarding so a message addressed to your domain name will be seamlessly forwarded to your current ISP.

Correspondence Course

E-mail correspondence is still in its early stages of development; however, clearly, correspondence via e-mail is an emerging means of communication.

For years, salon owners have used business stationary with the salon's logo and contact information preprinted on the paper to portray a professional image. Today, salon owners would not dream of corresponding with a client using blank paper. Unlike printed business letterhead, there is not yet a universal option to include the name, logo and other address information that is typical of business letterhead. Essentially, an e-mail message begins as the equivalent of a blank piece of paper.

Until e-mail users catch up with available technology such as sending e-mail in HTML format, the easiest way to make an e-mail look professional is with a signature block, also known as a signature file. Most e-mail programs allow for one or several signature blocks that may be created in either the e-mail program itself or in any word processing program.

To examine how to set up the signature file in your e-mail program, pull out the manual or open the help window within your e-mail application and search for "signature." This should lead you through several simple steps. If the signature block is created within the e-mail program, it typically is easier to do, but often more limiting in the number of allowed lines. If the e-mail program links to a signature file created elsewhere, the critical aspect to remember is to save the file as plain text, and not in the native format of the word processing program. The number of lines allowed usually is limited, so be sure to test a signature block on yourself before using it in correspondence.

Some signature files are made part of the visible message as you type. Others are appended behind the scenes after you finish the message. In either case, the signature block appears automatically every time a new e-mail message is created. This way you do not have to retype your signature every time you send a new message. Because the signature file appears in the message as editable text, it is a simple matter to highlight and delete one of the two referenced Web sites to further tailor the message to the recipient. Businesses tend to frown on cutesy signature blocks.

In addition, signature files can be spruced up with either quoted text or ASCII art. ASCII art uses plain old text characters to paint a picture. However, the problem with ASCII art is the inconsistency in display of multiple blank spaces. If you are still using ASCII art in your e-mail, you can find plenty of existing designs at Cool Signature. (www.coolsig.com/ascii.html) or at www.geocities.com/soho/7373. If all you want is to convert the name of your salon to ASCII art, visit www.surfplaza.com/figlet for an online wizard that will generate text art in multiple styles from words typed in by you.

Additionally, some e-mail addresses are preceded by "mailto:". In newer-version e-mail programs, this creates a live link. If a reader of the message wants to respond to one of the e-mail addresses, they simply can click on the live link and start typing the message. There is no need to retype or cut and paste the address. This especially is important when posting messages to newsgroups or when you want people replying to an address different from the host messenger. However, the "mailto:" has to be used exactly right or it will not work.

Similar to making the e-mail address a live link, signature files also should make the Web address a live link. If the reader wants to visit the referenced page, all they need to do is click on the link and the Web browser automatically will load the requested page. Again, there is no need to retype the URL.

The weakest component of e-mail today is associated with attachments. Any message typed into any e-mail program on any operating system can be read by any other e-mail programs on any other operating system. Windows users of QuickMail can send messages to Macintosh users of Eudora with no problem. The problem is introduced when the sender attaches a file created in some program other than the e-mail program. A file might be an image, a sound, a spreadsheet or a word processing document. Invariably, it cannot open the attachment, it opens but can not read it or it translates it into varying degrees of nonsense.

Attachments saved in a Web-friendly format are the easiest to send without hassle. That would include HTML, TIF and JPEG files. Word processing files saved in their native format are the most likely to be corrupted when opened at the other end unless the receiver has the same operating system and the same version of the same word processing program. If sending file attachments is an important consideration, there are several options. Adobe Acrobat is the leading software program that converts documents into portable document format (pdf) to be easily opened by any computer using any software.

A shortcut idea is to take advantage of HTML. A file saved in HTML format almost always can be opened at the other side. Modern word processing programs will do an auto-convert of a file into HTML format. This is not a fail-safe way to do attachments, as it depends on the preference settings within the viewer's browser. An HTML document might be viewed with all the HTML coding visible.

The most assured way of getting a message across without corruption is to incorporate it into the body of the e-mail message. If the attachment is a word processing document without a lot of formatting, simply highlight it, copy it, and then paste it into the body of the e-mail message. Fancy formatting will be lost, but basic text will be retained.

Salon owners need to remember that e-mail is emerging as an essential business tool for salon owners and managers. With a little advance learning, your e-mail can become an effective and cost-efficient form of communication.