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(Thanks to Jonathan Kanner for compiling this list of Email Prayer and Newsletter Guidelines. Jonathan has met a real need here, not to mention a real encouragement for the whole Brigada concept. He wrote recently, "As for Brigada Today, keep 'em coming. I find something interesting in almost every issue." Very kind, Jonathan... but thanks to you for your valuable contribution to our "brain trust" here!) To write the compiler, send an email to: Jonathan at Kanner dot com, but retype the email address into obvious email syntax. (This is a new approach so that on-line contributors to Brigada don't get spammed by the automated vacuum cleaner spam-harvesters! :-) )

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***** P R A Y E R  A N D   N E W S L E T T E R   G U I D E L I N E S *****

*** INTRODUCTION ***

As God's children, we ought to always seek to honor our father in every possible way. This includes our use of the internet. Since the Lord does not need the internet to receive communications from us this generally means honoring and respecting our brothers and sisters as we use the internet to communicate with them. In creating a message for mass-distribution by e-mail, certain guidelines should be adhered to for best effect and to maintain the highest possible level of respect for the recipients.

E-mail is truly a wonderful means of communication. It has the immediacy of a telegram if not quite that of a phone call, plus it allows us to organize our thoughts well as we compose a message. It also allows for a relatively high level of security if needed, a fairly sophisticated level of multimedia presentation if needed and all this at a fairly low cost and a high level of convenience. It makes a great way for Christian workers to stay in touch with partners around the globe and to convey specific prayer requests back to them.

Unfortunately, there are some potential complications that arise more and more often these days. There was a time when e-mail was the reserved domain of a select few computer affectionados who had access to the internet and knew enough about Unix to work with e-mail commands. Those of us who can still remember what UIDL, RSET, PASS mean, also remember an informal but fairly rigid protocol for e-mail, fully worthy of Emily Post. Certain things we did not do because they could cause problems. Our messages were plain and unformatted text with unsolicited attachments generally considered gauche.

These days, anyone with access to a phone including a cell or satellite phone can use e-mail and there is a great variety of e-mail software that allows attachments to be included as easy as point and click and they can elaborately format text and graphics as easily as a word processor. Such special features make it easy to forget about old-fashioned e-mail courtesy and common sense just like they eliminate the need to know what RSET means. These special features have the potential to cause complications though, and they must be handled carefully to avoid creating genuine problems.

*** COMPLICATIONS THAT CAN OCCUR ***

What kind of complications can occur? They are almost unlimited, but the list below covers the common ones:

1. Messages with special features such as bold or colored text and graphics may be very large chunks of data even though the message is actually very brief.

2. Messages with special features rarely look exactly the same on every computer in the world, though they usually look similar on most computers. This means the formatting that looks so attractive on one screen may look very amateurish on someone else's screen and your careful layout may look like a child's silliness.

3. Though the world of e-mail has improved greatly in recent years, some special features may be lost or worse yet garbled by some e-mail systems.

4. Attachments may be very large depending on how they were created and saved. Compressing them may not help much and may create serious virus and compatibility issues.

5. Attachments may be useless and frustrating to many recipients who do not necessarily have all the same software that the sender does.

6. We live in a fallen and evil world and evil men try to exploit modern technology to harm others, including complete strangers. This is clearly evident in the profusion of viruses, worms and other malicious creations on the internet. Complex formatted messages are more likely to spread such evil despite the senders best intentions and attempts to be careful. They also make detection harder in some cases. Attachments, especially certain types of attachments raise the risk even more.

7. For security reasons, many large corporations do not allow employees to receive outside e-mail with certain types of attachments. Attachments that can use "macros", such as MS Word, Powerpoint, and any kind of database or spreadsheet such as Excel and Foxpro are the most common targets. The corporate network simply destroys the attachment. For the same reason, formatted e-mails may be stripped of formatting.

8. Anti Spam software generally looks for certain formatting features. Too much of the wrong kind of formatting can get your message labeled as the dreaded Spam!

9. You can end up giving every one on your recipient list the full name and e-mail address for every other recipient as part of you header "to" list

*** WHAT KIND OF PROBLEMS ARISE FROM THE COMPLICATIONS? ***

The problems that can occur as a result of these complications are obvious in some cases and not so obvious in others. The problems include:

1. Your message is garbled and hard to read for some or most of your recipients.

2. Your message cannot be read at all by some or most of your recipients.

3. Your attachment cannot be opened by some or most of your recipients.

4. Your message and attachment are very inconvenient for some or most of your recipients. Remember that few outside Europe and large North American cities have access to DSL, Cable Internet, or even to fast dial-up service. A half-megabyte slide show attachment can take over an hour to receive on a dial-up connection. Some international internet connections only allow use for an hour at a time. This means that your large attachment may not only keep a recipient from getting your message, but may block all their access to all their messages until they have made a possibly expensive service call to their internet service provider.

5. Your message and attachment may be expensive for the recipient. In the developing world and even in a few parts of the USA, people may have to pay for the messages they receive according to their size or how long they take to come in by modem, and may even have to pay storage charges for attachments. Some e-mail users receive messages via expensive international phone calls.

6. Your complex message may damage someone's computer if it harbors a virus, even if you virus checked it before you sent it. (You do use anti-virus software and keep it current, don't you?)

7. Your message may be routed to an electronic trash can unopened, or worse yet can get you listed as a Spammer, the pariah of the internet whose messages should be targeted for automatic deletion by mail servers that have automatic Spam controls.

8. You can inadvertantly provide hacker and spammers with access to your mailing list - not a nice thing to do to your friends.

*** AVOIDING PROBLEMS ***

In order to avoid these complications and the problems they often lead to, consider the following points:

1. Do you truly need to create formatted messages? Will the reader really benefit from colored or italic text? Or is it mainly for decoration? Is the benefit to 95% of the potential readers worth the possibility of confusing or frustrating 5% ?

2. Is a picture or graphic an important part of the message? Or is it something optional? If it is truly helpful, does it need to be sent to each recipient? Or can it be placed on a web site so that each recipient can choose for themselves?

3. Should you have two mailing lists? One for those who have high-speed connections and the latest system and like it fancy and one for people with old computers and dial-up service who want it plain?

4. If you do chose to use formatting or include attachments, are they readable to most of your recipients? Remember in making this decision that in general the one who is not able is open your attachment because they cannot afford a new computer system and software is also most likely to be the one who has to pay a significant amount of extra money to receive your message that they cannot read.

5. Have you taken all the proper security factors into account?

Each e-mail user will have to answer such questions for their own situation, but in doing so, bear in mind that some of your recipients will have problems with complex messages or attachments and most of those that do will never tell you. They will just assume you are using your e-mail incorrectly (which in a sense would be true) and some may not even know you are sending a message to them. Some may be reluctant to "complain" or ask to be taken off of your mailing list for fear of giving offense.

*** PRACTICAL GUIDELINES ***

As general guidelines, the following are suggested:

1. Do not use specialized formatting features (bold text, underlines, large and small fonts, centering of titles, and colors) unless it is really necessary to convey the message. Some e-mail software such as Outlook sends all messages with formatting whether you intend to do it or not, even if you did not do any formatting at all. Learn how to turn this feature off, or get basic e-mail software. Some good free basic e-mail software is available.

2. Remember that when needed for easy reading or prominent titles ALL CAPITALS, ***** Star Leaders *****, __________________________________ rows of underscores, and i n t e r s p e r s e d s p a c e s are "formatting features" that any e-mail system can easily deal with, but please use them sparingly. They are great for section headings in a long message. They tend to look tacky when used too much.

3. Do not include attachments unless they are truly needed. In days of old, it was considered downright rude to send unsolicited attachments. Some of us old-timers still wince a bit at them. If you do chose to use an attachment, bear in mind that most people do not have the exact same combination of operating system and software that you do. Would it possible to post your special attachment on a web site and then e-mail everybody on your list just the plain text in the e-mail message with a note to those who want the fancy version to go to a certain web page? This is often the best compromise by the way.

4. If you just bought a new computer and it has the latest version of Windows and MS Word on it you may think that everyone has MS Word so they can open your MS Word attachment, but that is not usually true. What about someone with a Macintosh or Unix system? What about someone with a two year old version of Windows and Word? To them, your carefully laid out pages may be gibberish, or may even lock up their computer. Use a format for your attachment that is carefully chosen (see below) for compatibility, file size, and reliability

5. There are many file formats that are pretty much universal. Perhaps the best for most people is the "PDF" format. These letters stand for Portable Document Format. The software that CREATES PDF's is called Adobe Acrobat. This used to be an expensive and hard to use program. Recent versions are very easy to use and fairly cheap. There are also cheap generic equivalents now. The special software to READ PDF's is free and very easy to use. It came with most new computers sold in the past five years. It can be taken for free from Adobe's web site too. It is available for almost any computer system in the world including DOS, Apple II's Unix, mainframes, Amiga's and other antiques and oddballs, so truly almost anyone can read a PDF. A PDF will always look pretty much the same on any computer. You can be confident that the bold and daring Red 18 point text on your new Windows XP system will not turn into illegible yellow 3 point text on somebody's twelve year old Macintosh or vice versa. PDF's also can have special security features if you want to bother with them, and they are relatively hard to infect with viruses and infected PDF's are relatively easy to virus scan and disinfect. PDF's are often smaller than the MS Word or Powerpoint file they were created from, an added advantage. They do not easily accommodate sound or movies, but do you really need to send a movie to everyone you know? Nah... probably not.

HTML is another pretty universal file format. This is the format web pages are made in. Anyone with a browser such as Explorer or Navigator can view HTM file types, even if their computer is very old and has very old software. HTM's are usually bigger than equivalent PDF's and they often do not look exactly the same on every computer in the world but they can include sound and movies if you really must. Most recent word processor and graphics and presentation software can save as HTML as a built-in feature. PDF's and HTM's both allow you to include clickable links to other parts of the document or even to web sites, but don't get carried away!

5. If you simply must attach a Powerpoint or MS Word file, be very careful about file sizes. The latest versions of these programs have many advanced features that tend to make for large files even if you are not using those special features.

6. For compatibility and file size, learn how to "downsave", that is to use the <save as> command to force your software to use an older format, preferably the oldest one available that supports all the special features that you truly need. New versions of software usually do very well at opening older versions of files, but not the other way around. Downsaving will often produce a generic warning message that predicts possible lost formatting. Usually this message comes automatically whether it is applicable to your specific case or not. Try ignoring the message, then close the file and then re-open it. If you see everything the way you need it, then the downsave did not lose important formatting. Remember to save a copy in the latest format first so that you can revert to it.

7. If you need to include a few pictures in an other wise unformatted e-mail message, be careful of the file size. If you have a 3 megapixel digital camera, you can easily create a single picture file that will take hours to send over the phone line. Crop all unneeded parts of the picture away, and use the lowest resolution that will show needed details. Do all of this before you copy it into your message or attachment. Save the file as a GIF or JPG for reliability and compatibility. Avoid BMP's PCT's and other proprietary formats that are or were originally unique to Macintoshes, Windows, or certain special graphics and photo software.

8. For security, do not use a set of matched software and operating system. If you use MS Word to create an attachment on a Windows computer and then mail it to everyone with Outlook Express, you create a lot of needless security risks for you and your recipients. If you use MS Word to create an attachment on a Macintosh and send it to everyone with Eudora, you have solidly defeated many popular hacker's tricks and also blocked many of the methods that sneaky viruses and worms may use to spread from system to system. If you simply must use all one brand, get really good firewall software and learn how to use it.

9. NEVER place everyone's name in the To: section of an e-mail unless you are truly sure that everyone already knows everyone else and is willing to share such info so freely. This is what most easily spreads everyone's address to everyone else, and to a hacker that breaks into even one recipients computer, such as by slipping a virus or trojan horse in on them. Do not assume that all your friends use current anti-virus software. ALWAYS use the "undisclosed recipients" or "BCC:" option to make sure that nobody on the list gets every one else's e-mail address along with your message. This will also insure that some recipient does not accidentally "reply to all" and send a very personal or sensitive message back to you - and also to every one on your list.

*** IN CONCLUSION ***

Have fun, but exercise restraint. It can be very satisfying to create a highly elaborate electronic newsletter, but doing so can actually end up detracting from the function of the document.

Take a look at a newspaper. They can use a lot of pictures and special formatting these days, but the best regarded ones usually use relatively few photos and complex graphics. Color text and exotic fonts are usually only found in the masthead on the top of page one. Adding complexity to the formatting usually does not add to the reader's experience and in fact more often detracts from it - this is why the papers limit themselves most of the time.

Just because you can use a lot of special effects does not mean that it is helpful to do so. Remember the broad range of recipients that a typical prayer letter goes out to and try to do your best to accommodate all of them. Some of my most faithful prayer partners are scattered in odd corners of the globe and they pay a lot to receive my messages. I would lose them if I sent formatted e-mail.