E Mail Messages

Want to get ahead in your career? Impress your clients? Here's what the experts say is the proper etiquette for the high-tech workplace. E-mail Don't write all in caps. It's the equivalent of electronic shouting. Don't write all in lower case because it's more difficult to read. The subject line should be specific, one that will attract attention among the dozens of e-mails your recipient will wade through each day. When you receive a reply and send another e-mail, update the subject line so the reader won't accidentally delete it. Be brief.

She's pretty, and she drives a gold Saturn. For two years, that's all Mark Macek knew about the woman who lived next door. Although he had often admired her from afar, he never had the nerve to approach her. So he watched, and he wondered. "I was always too nervous to say anything to her," said Mark, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland's dental school. "I never thought I'd have the chance to meet her." His only chance, he remembers thinking, might be if he casually ran into her in the parking lot of their apartment building in Columbia.

I sent my son an e-mail a couple of days ago with directions to a family gathering in Philadelphia. When I didn't get a response, I called his college dorm room to find out whether he'd received it.It turned out he'd been busy. He's a student computer aide, and his mailbox was so jammed with messages that he'd missed mine."It's this Melissa virus thing," he complained."Were that many people infected?" I asked."No, I don't know anybody who's infected," he said, "but everybody's worried about it."

When Bill Clinton and his staffers vacate the White House in January, they'll leave behind a historic mess: eight years' worth of memos, snapshots and bureaucratic bric-a-brac that must be preserved for posterity by the National Archives, the government's official record keeper. And, oh yes, there's also the little matter of 40 million e-mail messages. While the Clinton administration isn't the first to have electronic mail, it's the first to amass so much of it. Recorded on thousands of magnetic computer tapes, the messages will constitute the largest single deposit of digital records in the history of the National Archives.

Memo to City Hall: You've got mail. Tons of it. And it's about to disappear. Millions of old e-mail messages are clogging Baltimore's municipal computers, so the city is going to start automatically deleting any messages older than 90 days. A common practice in private business, the move raises questions when made by a municipality, which has a responsibility to retain certain public records. City employees will be expected to sort through the mish-mash of personal messages and spam to find any e-mail that is official agency business, then save those messages on their hard drives or on paper.

Microsoft Corp. just finished a pretty rough few weeks, and I was planning to ease up on them. And then along came Bubbleboy.By now you may have heard of this computer virus. If you use Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 browser and the company's Outlook or Outlook Express e-mail programs, Bubbleboy will send a copy of itself to everybody in your address book. Other than that it's pretty much harmless.The scary part is the way it works. You get Bubbleboy by reading an e-mail message. Just display the message on your screen, and your computer can be infected.

The state employee who was forced to resign this week for spreading rumors about Martin O'Malley's personal life has sent an e-mail apologizing to the mayor and his family for actions he admitted were "reckless" and "mean-spirited." Addressed to "Mister Mayor," the e-mail was sent Wednesday but reached O'Malley's office only yesterday, after city staffers discovered it among hundreds of e-mail messages about potholes and other run-of-the-mill constituent concerns. "I am writing today to apologize to you, your wife, and your children for my thoughtless and indefensible promulgation of rumors concerning your family life," Joseph F. Steffen Jr. wrote.

It doesn't take an expensive poll or an exhaustive round of phone calls for Joe DiGiacinto to check the mood of the Maryland electorate. All he has to do is switch on his computer.Every few hours, between other chores, the office manager at Ellen R. Sauerbrey's campaign sits down at the keyboard in his cubbyhole. He quickly sorts through the latest batch of e-mail messages -- compliments and criticisms, policy questions and personal gripes, requests for lawn signs and for help with school projects.

First the computer revolutionized higher education.Now the Internet, the international web of computer networks, is keeping the revolution alive. No one knows for sure where the "information superhighway" is going. No one knows its potential. It's a work in progress.At the University of Maryland Baltimore County, professors aren't yet teaching classes over the Internet, but they're doing everything but. Course notes, outlines, assignments go out on internal computer networks. Students discuss the content of courses, they conduct research, they complain about grades by computer.

A Howard County elementary school principal is suing an Ellicott City parent who wrote letters and e-mail messages that falsely accused him of sexually abusing young boys. Hollifield Station Elementary Principal Glenn Heisey's lawsuit comes one month after Robert Hunter Johnson, whose children attended the school, pleaded guilty to making a false statement and was sentenced to a month in jail. The letters hurt Heisey's standing in the community and among his peers and left the principal in "fear of his health and safety," according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Howard Circuit Court last week.