RT ter As promised, this month we will cover more tips with email. As we know from last month and from our own daily use, email can be one of the most effective ways of commu- nicating in the modem world. It can also be fun, and humor- ous. We will proper email etiquette this month. One of the joys of many people is these great joke emails that seem to have been forwarded to most of the globe. Many of these forwards are funny and can be very apt to the current situation on the globe. Take the recent action in the Middle East. Not long after it started, jokes and stories were flying through peoples inboxes. These can be a great laugh, but they can also drive people mad. Please be sure that the friend you are forwarding the joke wants to receive it, other- wise they may no longer be your friend. Many friendships have been destroyed this way. Likewise if you are getting jokes from somebody feel free to let them know that you don't want these messages and they should stop. If they don't stop, feel free to go to your friend's house, with a sledgehammer, and pound their computer into a pulp. They, to may no longer be your friend, but the jokes will stop. Only kidding. Things don't have to escalate to this position, but be forewarned, not everybody wants an inbox full of forwards. Another piece of etiquette that many people miss is the for- warding of hoaxes. An email hoax is a piece of information normally regarding a false virus or other computer problem. One of the most familiar ones was the teddy bear virus. It told you to go through and find a system files that controlled most of the java classes on your computer. If you deleted it then you couldn' open many web pages. Thousands of peo- ple fell victim to this and an equal number of computer techs became increasingly frustrated with the number of re- peat calls they had to do over the same problem. This hoax circulated for years and is still catching people. There is a very simple solution here. Simply check to see if the wam- ing you are sending is valid. To do this simply go to www. google.com and type in the suspected hoax. If it is not real then you will find a lot of web pages stating that fact. If it is real, then you will find info regarding this and you will be able to send your friends valid information. Many people need to forward emails to a large group of people. You can to this the old way, by putting in each indi- viduals email address consecutively. This can tick people off as anyone getting that email can pick up the addresses. The better way of doing this is to create a sender list or group. Use your address book to do this. Simply open the address book, select open, select new and choose group. In the new window that appears, you will see a spot on the left where you can choose members of the group and a spot on the right where you can add people to the group. Give the group a title when you are done and voila, when you send the group an email, all everyone sees is the title of the group, not each individual email. Remember, email can be fun to. If you aren't in business and don't have to send professional emails all of the time, then feel free to gussy your emails up. You can do this by adding backgrounds, new fonts, and stationary. It can be a lot of fun. However, remember, the more you do to an email, the more information that must be sent, so it will take longer for these emails to send. Apart from that, you can add as much as you would like. Have fun. For more tips and fun, feel free to type email tips and fun into www.google. com and see what comes back. You could also check out Incredimail. Until next month, happy computing. Pat Larkin, Steve Hungerford, Judson Levere. Debug Computers Debug Computer Services (613) 476-8721 Open 9-5 Mon-Fri Ask for Pat or Steve - debugcomputers@hotmail.com