Karen, thanks for these thoughts. I never thought about it that way. Em -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Karen Leverich Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 12:05 PM Cc: Rootsweb mailing list Subject: [ROOTS-L] Unanswered E-mail Totally innocent mail can also be diverted to the spam folder, and simply go unnoticed. I know this has happened to me: I wrote to a small committee last year, three women, and only one saw my note. The others found it in their spam folders, after she told them I'd written. Even without landing in a spam folder, though, my (deceased) father's e-mail account receives about 40 pieces of spam to one piece of "real" mail. The ratio is worse than it was because most of his correspondents know he died, and I'm contacting the few who didn't know (his alumni association, for instance). But even before all that, when he was alive but needed some help with it, I was amazed at the ratio of useless stuff to good stuff and how diligently one needed to look to find the real messages. So, a tip! Think about the SUBJECT LINE you use. You don't need to put it all in caps, but it needs to be something that tells the recipient that your message is real as opposed to all the other garbage it is buried in. Think of your message being in the middle of a whole series of ... well, I won't copy the titles of messages in my spam folder, or that's where this message will go. "Edna Merrill was my grandmother ... are you my cousin?" might be good, if you were writing to someone related to Edna Merrill, that sort of thing... Karen ===== If you would prefer digest mode to mail mode, drop a note to [email protected] and ask for the digest... ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4354 / Virus Database: 3722/7251 - Release Date: 03/26/14