Thoughts About Email, Including Thoughts About Encryption
I get way too much email, hundreds of messages each day. I rely on
programs to automatically file my email and to search my email. Hence,
I'd appreciate it if you'd help me process email from you more carefully.
Here are a few short guidelines.
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Please take the time to choose an appropriate subject line for your
email message.
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If I tell you to use a particular subject line for an email message,
particularly for an assignment, please use that subject line.
The correct subject makes it easier for me to file your email
and, more importantly, for me to find your email.
The typical subject line is “CSC 151 *Assignment*: *Title*
(*Your Names*)”. For example, in submitting the typical
introductory survey, I might use the subject line “CSC 151
Assignment 1: Introductory Survey (Samuel A. Rebelsky)” or
the subject line “CSC 151 Assignment 1: Introductory Survey
(Rebelsky)”.
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If you are asking for help on an assignment, please do not use a
title like “Homework assignment”. I generally assume
that titles like that represent submissions
of homework assignments, and may file them without looking at them
until it comes time to grade the assignment. If you're asking a
question, please put a term like “Question” or
“Help” or even “HELP!” in the subject
line. (Yes, I know that the use of all capital letters is a form
of shouting. It's okay if you virtually shout when asking for help.)
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If you are replying to a message and are changing the topic of
the message, please also change the subject line. If you want to
be precise, you can include the old subject line in parentheses,
prefixed by the word “Was”, as in “Question on
the assignment (was re: This week's convocation)”.
Authentication and Encryption
Most of us, myself included, don't think much about email, other
than that it's a convenient way to communicate. But a few recent
events suggest that we should be a bit more thoughtful. Hence,
I encourage you to consider using mail encryption software,
particularly the GNU Privacy
Guard (GPG).
Since I use GPG, I've written a really brief introduction.
There are a host of more useful and more comprehensive introductions to and tutorials about GPG,
so I'm not going to write much here, other than to recommend that
you learn about using GPG. I will say that, depending on what email
package I'm using and who I'm communicating with, encryption is either
trivial (one click and one password when I'm using Mail.app on the
Macintosh and sending email) or a slight pain (saving the encrypted
message as a file and then running a decryption program when I'm
receiving an encrypted message via Webmail).
GPG is available for all three major operating systems (and probably
for others, too).
-
On the Mac, I use GPGMail 2.
I find it simple and straightforward.
-
I don't use Microsoft Windows, but I hear that
gpg4win
works pretty well.
-
On the Linux workstations in the MathLAN, GPG is installed as
a command line tool.
If you send me your public (or a link to your public key) and ask me to
encrypt email to do you, I will do my best to remember (although I may
not always succeed). You can find my public key at
http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~rebelsky/rebelsky.gpg or at the MIT key server,
http://pgp.mit.edu/.
