Message Anatomy

A Brief E-Mail Primer

Message Anatomy

So that you can make heads or tails of the messages you read, let's inspect a typical specimen to see what's what. As you can see in the following example, a message has three main parts: the header, the body, and the signature.

Date: Sat, 1 Apr 98 13:45 GMT To: htarlek@tweedledumb.com From: vbassoon@buyordye.com (Vital Bassoon) Subject: An incorrect shipment. AGAIN! Cc: acarlson@tweedledumb.com Herb, Those Neanderthals in your Shipping department have done it again! This time they sent me 5 skids of "Wavy Locks" perm lotion instead of 5 boxes of "Wavy Lay's" potato chips! Either you hire people with at least a double-digit IQ, or I'll find a new distributor!!! Vital Bassoon Buy or Dye Convenience Store and Hair Salon Toad Suck, Arkansas "At Intel, quality is job 0.9999992362"
THE HEADER
THE BODY
THE SIGNATURE

The Header

The first few lines constitute the header, and they represent the message's vital statistics. Lots of obscure things can appear in a header (especially the headers of messages you receive), but only a few are truly useful items:

Date: This is the date and time the message was sent. The time given is usually Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is five hours earlier than Eastern Standard Time. (You'll also see GMT referred to as Universal Time, or UT.)

To: This is the e-mail address of the recipient.

From: This is the e-mail address and (usually) the real name of the person who sent the message.

Subject: This is a one-line description of what the message is about. This line is crucial because most Netizens with busy e-mail inboxes decide whether they'll read a message just by scanning the Subject line. To ensure that your missives get read, make the Subject line detailed enough that it accurately reflects what your message is about.

Cc: This is the "courtesy copy" line, and it shows the e-mail addresses of people who received copies of the message.

The Body

The body is the content of the message, and it's always separated from the header by a blank line. When composing the body, be sure to use only the so-called printable ASCII characters, which means just the letters, numbers, and symbols you can eyeball on your keyboard. (I'll have more to say about this topic later on; see Minding Your E-Mail Manners.)

The Signature

The message's signature is an addendum that appears as the last few lines of the message. Its purpose is to let the folks out there reading your e-mail know a little more about the Renaissance man or woman who sent it. Although signatures are optional, many people use them because they can add a friendly touch to your correspondence. You can put anything you like in your signature, but most people just put their name, their company name and address, their other e-mail addresses, if they have multiples, and maybe a quote or two that fits in with their character.

Some signatures are absurdly elaborate; most Internet types get upset at any signature that extends for more than a half dozen lines or so. (This is called "wasting bandwidth," and I'll talk more about it when I talk about Netiquette later.)

Table of Contents

The Header

The Body

The Signature