I’d be up for a cadet 101 on email - I’m just blasting and spamming everyone all over the place!
I bet half the moans on here are about me!
I put together some handouts/posters for a course we were due to run prior to lockdown. I need to update them to account for the latest changes to JSPs 101 and 441 / 747 but I’ll be glad to share them once they’re done.
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It’s things like this that are commonly done but actually very poorly documented for a new CFAV/staff cadet. Only very recently was the email ACP updated to say you need the date and classification (if OS) in the subject, and even then it’s really poorly written. It refers to things like putting the classification in the header of the email… where’s the header!?
Indeed. In some cases we can just expect staff to educate themselves on certain topics.
But for this sort of thing it’s far more efficient and far more likely to achieve the desired results if we just show people.
It’s still a rarity to see people including the date in the subject and when they do I’d say that better than 95% of the time people don’t update it when they reply to email… Instead of the new date you see “Re: [some date last week]”. I’m seeing people putting “…-O” at the end of subject lines… I’m seeing spaces between the hyphens… “20210226 - Some Email - O” is not correct.
We actually need to train our staff rather than just leaving them to fend for themselves (of course this applies to virtually everything we do wrt staff and is my current personal mission).
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I didn’t think you were supposed to change the date in the subject?
Yeah, you should. It’s supposed to conform to the standard for document naming, where the date of creation goes at the start.
The date you send your email is the date of creation. It’s important for email, because the moment you copy that email out of Outlook and into a document management system or NTFS folder the sent date is lost. The subject email becomes the file name, and that needs to reflect the date it was sent.
This is exactly it… We don’t tell people these things. Or in some cases we produce our own “guidance” which is wrong.
Or we could just accept that putting the date in an email that is timestamped anyway is a crap idea, and might work for the regular forces but we aren’t them.
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It’s not “time stamped” any more once you take it out of outlook and save it as a record. That’s the whole point.
I was once sent a very stern email by our dep wing commander, because I sent an email with a subject line of “DBS Issues”.
The email stated the correct format, and that going forward they expected all OCs to use that format, and it must be adhered to.
The next day, I there was an all squadrons email sent out by the same person, titled “Dining in night”. Sigh.
Life’s to short to worry about such things in a volunteer organisation.
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I agree and also I don’t.
Certainly it’s too short to worry… And certainly too short to entertain sternly worded reprimands.
But at the same time, it’s there for a valid reason; for the greater good. It takes a only a second to fix the subject line when sending an email and then nobody else has to worry. Versus the time it takes for someone who needs to save a dozen email into records when they have to first go through each message in turn and fix the subjects lines which people couldn’t be bothered to do right the first time…
If everyone just did it instead of griping because they don’t see the point there’d be a lot less hassle for everyone.
I think in 5 years I can count on one hand how many properly formatted emails I’ve received…
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But this breaks threading in most email clients, so does more harm than good
copying the body of an email into a word document (which is what I’d put money on most staff doing anyway) doesn’t preserve the subject line anyway. Does OWA even allow you to export an individual email as eml?
Where exactly are you saving things from an email? And why?
Would you do this at work?
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Yes, I grant you that… Of course, threading wasn’t a thing when we started using email.
OWA is a PITA… It certainly didn’t permit saving when I last used it which is one of the reasons why I’ve always used a proper email client.
Nobody should be copying the content into a word document… If they can’t export the email directly then they should “print” it to PDF.
Yes, I would. It’s about “record keeping”… Saving records of contracts, decisions, &c which I may need in the future.
The email inbox isn’t an archive.
I save them into the Sqn filing system. That used to be an NTFS structure on the server but I moved it to sharepoint when Teams was introduced.
We don’t have to save everything of course… Lots of email just gets deleted during the weekly weeding once the issues is done and dusted. But there are still plenty which should be saved.
I attended prep for AVIP recently and we were informed on that the following were the standards to use
YYYYMMDD-Subject-O = Official
YYYYMMDD-Subject-OS = Official Sensitive
That doesn’t surprise me, but it’s incorrect.
Ever since Government adopted the current marking scheme (OFFICIAL, SECRET, TOP SECRET) Everything is at the very least “Official” and the policy therefore was set as “you don’t need to mark Official”. One only needs to append a marking to anything OS or Secret and above.
This is the official MOD guide:
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I’m debating whether to start using mutt for email 
I’m not sure there’s an option to print to PDF from that! 
Threading in email clients is the bane of my existence. I hate it with a passion as it makes it so much easier to miss messages
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So long as you can print then you can install a free PDF maker. No need for the application to provide the ability.
Or if you’ve got Acrobat proper then it adds one automatically anyway.