How do you flag an email as ‘high importance’?

Jo4

How do you flag an email which you are about to send as ‘high importance’ in Internet Explorer?

Can you please explain in simple terms because although I googled it it really doesn't make a lot of sense and it is not something I have heard of before never mind attempted to do?

fwor

As you are using a browser (IE) is it safe to assume that you are using a service provider's webmail interface?

AFAIK there is no standard for webmail, so you need to say whose email service you are using.

victor2

Assuming you find out how to flag it, consider what it will mean to the recipient. In most cases, absolutely nothing.

Jo4

fwor wrote: »

As you are using a browser (IE) is it safe to assume that you are using a service provider's webmail interface?

AFAIK there is no standard for webmail, so you need to say whose email service you are using.

It is from a talk21.com account if that is what you are asking. Sorry but I don't know much about computers.

Jo4

victor2 wrote: »

Assuming you find out how to flag it, consider what it will mean to the recipient. In most cases, absolutely nothing.

It has been requested by the recipient.

HTH!

paddyrg

All you can do is write IMPORTANT in the subject line

There is no such thing as 'Important' in the spec for emails, the recipient is clearly using Outlook on an Exchange server (Exchange offers it as an extension to email on internal office systems), but it means nothing to the rest of the web. In short, you say you know little about computers, neither does the recipient to be honest ;-)

Jo4

paddyrg wrote: »

All you can do is write IMPORTANT in the subject line

There is no such thing as 'Important' in the spec for emails, the recipient is clearly using Outlook on an Exchange server (Exchange offers it as an extension to email on internal office systems), but it means nothing to the rest of the web. In short, you say you know little about computers, neither does the recipient to be honest ;-)

That's a relief as it isn't for me, it is for a friend! :T

Bollotom

When I go to write an email, there's a menu bar at the top of the message pane and under tools is a priority tag which I can set to low normal or high. I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird.

Also my Orange (fsmail) account has a box to tick for high importance.

Maybe make the subject line red and bold font? :cool:

fwor

paddyrg wrote: »

There is no such thing as 'Important' in the spec for emails, the recipient is clearly using Outlook on an Exchange server (Exchange offers it as an extension to email on internal office systems), but it means nothing to the rest of the web.

Are you certain about this? I've just checked the "permitted headers" for SMTP, and Priority and Importance can both be carried as message header entries.

It may be true that there is nothing that requires an email User Agent (such as Outlook) to interpret these headers or even display them to the user, but that does not mean that they can't be used.

My preferred email client (Thunderbird) allows me to set the Priority of each outgoing message, and it sets an appropriate header field in the message before it is sent. Whether the receiving email client does anything with it is outside of my control.

Dave_C_2

I've just sent myself an email from Thunderbird. As the above poster has said, I can set the priority to "highest".
If I choose to have the column turned on in Thunderbird (not default), I can see the "Highest" priority.
Not the slightest bit of difference looking at BTYahoo email.

I would go for "Important" in the header.

ISTR the works email (Outlook) recognising priority but we all turned it off because personnel* thought organograms were top priority

* This is the department that likes to call itself "HR". Everyone in HR has the word "Manager" in their job title.

Dave

paddyrg

RFC 821 - for backwards compatibility but indeed RFC 2821 no mention of importance header fields. Permitted fields are non-mandatory. Hey, <x-anything> is permitted after all ;-)

And it makes sense for most public mailservers to ignore those flags/fields if someone did set them...can you imagine any spammer setting importance to anything other than "blistering, crucial, world will end if you do not read"