Email overseas - hints for any country international travelers

  Overseas travel for anyone from any country is always going to differ in the processes involved with their native country. For some, this can prove quite challenging. There are a number of factors in terms of what to be aware of. Here are a few:

1. Size of emails, particularly attachments
2. Political consideration and censoring
3. Securing your data
4. Questionable language
5. Service available, speeds and connections
6. Proper Netiquette!

Any of these can be quite detailed in elaboration. These will be all discussed in the author's forthcoming book, mentioned at the end of this blog.

The rest of this blog will be from an article by Paul Mah from TechPublic dated July 13, 2009 which offers some very nice tips for email and overseas travel.

Configuring your mobile E-mail for an overseas trip

Going on an overseas business trip? An excellent way to stay in the loop when traveling is to tap into the world of mobile E-mail and have new E-mails instantly pushed to your Smartphone.

With overseas data rates at a premium, what are some settings or adjustments that you can make in order to minimize your mobile bill? I recently came back from a trip Down Under myself, and here is a list of what I did.

Unsubscribe from unnecessary newsletters
This is especially pertinent when going for a longer trip. While it is entirely plausible that these newsletters are actually useful, the chances dip next to zero when you’re vacationing or when you have an intense schedule. Why fret over overseas data charges when you can simply eliminate the bulk of your E-mails in the first place? So unsubscribe from those unnecessary newsletters now, and be merciless about it.
Have a proper spam filtering in place
Not only does it waste your time, but spam pushed to you via mobile E-mail consumes precious data bits. So it makes sense to have a robust server-side spam filter in place. I personally tap on Gmail as my spam filter. What about you?

Disable HTML E-mail

This one is a real killer. Those beautiful HTML-ed E-mails easily cost you many more times the data compared to plain text ones, and it’s worse if they contain embedded pictures. The major platforms such as Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones allow you to select Plain Text directly from your mobile device, so be sure to do that before you even board the plane.
Limit the length of message downloaded
This is useful when dealing with organizations that insist on tacking on multiple legal disclaimers to every E-mail they send, especially if it is done at the server. After a few rounds of replies, it is not unusual to have E-mails with only one or two lines of useful text and maybe half a dozen repeated disclaimers.
Download headers only
Sure, this is an extreme measure, but it will probably come in useful if you find yourself getting a sudden large influx of E-mails — from the exhibitors of the trade show you are attending, for example. Based on the sender and the content of the E-mail headers, you can decide whether or not to download the rest of the E-mail.

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We will be publishing a book on Netiquette shortly entitled "NetiquetteIQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". Also there will be an email "IQ" test on our website:

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paul@netiquetteiq.com
Paul Babicki
paul@netiquetteiq.com
 
"Good Netiquette Writing!"