E-mail is a convenient way to stay in touch with people. It is a critical tool for many businesses. However, anyone who has used e-mail for a significant amount of time will testify that wrangling e-mail can sometimes be a pain in the neck. Here are a few common complaints I hear about e-mail usage, and how you can steer clear of them.

“My personal e-mail isn’t personal anymore!” When I see a new e-mail appear from someone I’ve not talked to in a while, I get excited. Many times, however, the e-mail isn’t really to me at all — it’s to me, a couple of other people I know, and a whole slew of people I don’t. That’s not personal communication! Don’t fall into this trap. It’s fun to blast something to everyone in your address book from time to time, but don’t offend your friends by failing to make personal one-on-one contact from time to time.

The Never-Ending Forward: Everyone seems to have an e-buddy who has never met a joke, political comment, cute pet picture, conspiracy theory or personality quiz he didn’t love. These get forwarded along to you and dozens of other folks. As e-mail becomes more useful to you, these types of pesky intrusions lead to frustration as you spend more time sifting through the junk in order to find the good stuff. Use discrimination when forwarding e-mails, and consider that many people prefer to keep a clean Inbox. If you must forward an e-mail, consider the following netiquette:

• Avoid sending e-mails to everyone in your address book .
• Clean up the formatting of the e-mail! Once it’s been sent around the Internet a few hundred times, the e-mail starts to look ugly. Make it look like new before shipping it out again.
• Hide the addresses you’re sending to! I might not want your crazy uncle Hal to have my personal e-mail address. Consider sending the e-mail “To:” yourself, and “BCC:” everyone else.

Formatting the life out of your e-mail: It doesn’t require sunflower “e-Stationary” with an animated paper folding itself into an envelope and dozens of links to personal sites just to say hello. Keep it simple! Let the content of your message speak the loudest. Every picture you add and font you change adds to the overall size of your e-mail. The larger your e-mail, the longer it takes to transmit and the more storage space it consumes on mail servers. It’s like wrapping all of your furniture in thick layers of bubble wrap — you diminish the usefulness of the piece and make it take up more space in the process. Ask yourself: Has anyone ever complained that the “plain text” e-mail you sent him was “too plain?” I doubt it.

Towing a bus with a Yugo: Brace yourself. This may come as a shock: E-mail was not intended to transfer files. It can do it, I’m not disputing that. Your e-mail client can take a file and transform it into text. It can then cram that encoded text into your e-mail which is then reassembled by your friend’s e-mail client at the end of the journey.

However, if you’re transferring anything much larger than a document or spreadsheet, or if the security of that file is of any concern to you, consider using an online file storage and delivery service. These services let you park your files on their servers, then you simply e-mail your friend a link instead of a file. When your friend is ready, he clicks the link and downloads the file. No muss, no fuss, no clogged mail servers.

Links: Megaupload is a popular online file server. Its free account allows for 50GB free online storage and several other features — www.megaupload.com

Kevin McDonald: Writer and professional computer/network administrator. He lives in Amarillo with his wife and children, and owns and operates Definition Computers. E-mail Kevin with questions you’d like to see answered in this column.

(This article was originally published in the Amarillo Independent newspaper.)