Greetings in email.

Do you know what I just spent way too long doing? Scrolling through all of my sent messages.

I realized two very important (and slightly embarrassing) things:

One: I send way too many emails. I mean way too many.
Two: I start nearly every single one with "I hope you're doing well!" Seriously. Every. Single. One.

Has anyone ever been full of more hope than me?

Jokes aside, You wouldn't think that your email greeting would be that complicated to write.

But, I've learned that landing on that perfect sentence that seamlessly segues into the rest of my note is an art form in and of itself.

Do you find yourself as stumped as I do? You're in luck. I've rounded up 40 different email greetings you can use to kick start your message. Because, let's face it--nobody actually means "Happy Monday!"

If You Need Something Formal

1.  Allow Me to Introduce Myself 
2. Good afternoon
3. Good morning
4. How are you?
5. Hope this email finds you well
6. I hope you enjoyed your weekend
7. I hope you're doing well
8. I hope you're having a great week
9. I hope you're having a wonderful day
10. It's great to hear from you
11. I'm eager to get your advice on...
12. I'm reaching out about...
13. Thank you for your help
14. Thank you for the update
15. Thanks for getting in touch
16. Thanks for the quick response

If You're Following Up on Something

17. As promised, I'm...
18. As we discussed on our call...
19. Can you provide me with an update on...
20. I'm checking in on...
21. I'm getting back to you about...
22. To follow up on our meeting...

If You Want to Get (Appropriately) Personal

23. Congratulations on [recent accomplishment]
24. How did [recent project] turn out?
25. I hope you enjoyed your [event or vacation]
26. I loved your recent [photo/article/social media post]
27. I was just laughing the other day about [inside joke]
28. I was just thinking about you and [shared memory]
29. It was great to see you at [event]
30. This [article/video/GIF] made me think of you
31. [Mutual Contact] recommended I get in touch with you

If You're Feeling Funny

32. Happy "Not Monday"
33. Hello from the other side
34. Here's the good news: Only [number] more days until Friday
35. Hope you're surviving another workweek
36. I hope you've had your coffee already
37. It's me again
38. I'll keep this short
39. I'm sorry if this Message sabotaged "inbox zero" for you
40. Just what you want: another email!

It's important to keep in mind that not all of these opening lines will be appropriate for every email you send. An important client or your boss, for example, will probably require something from the "formal" category. But, a close colleague or long-time friend? Well, he or she might get a kick out of a funny greeting that strays from the tried and true standards.

At any rate, there's no need to follow in my footsteps and begin every single one of your messages with the same greeting. Now that I have this list pulled together, you can bet I'll be using it as inspiration for all of my emails--and, I think you should too.

Have another opening line that you love to use? Let me know on Twitter what I missed.

How To Secure Apache with Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu 16.04

Introduction

This tutorial will show you how to set up a TLS/SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt on an Ubuntu 16.04 server running Apache as a web server.
SSL certificates are used within web servers to encrypt the traffic between the server and client, providing extra security for users accessing your application. Let’s Encrypt provides an easy way to obtain and install trusted certificates for free.

Prerequisites

In order to complete this guide, you will need:

• An Ubuntu 16.04 server with a non-root sudo-enabled user, which you can set up by following our Initial Server Setup guide
• The Apache web server installed with one or more domain names properly configured through Virtual Hosts that specify ServerName.

When you are ready to move on, log into your server using your sudo-enabled account.

Step 1 — Install the Let's Encrypt Client

Let's Encrypt certificates are fetched via client software running on your server. The official client is called Certbot, and its developers maintain their own Ubuntu software repository with up-to-date versions. Because Certbot is in such active development it's worth using this repository to install a newer version than Ubuntu provides by default.
First, add the repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot

You'll need to press ENTER to accept. Afterwards, update the package list to pick up the new repository's package information:

sudo apt-get update

And finally, install Certbot from the new repository with apt-get:

sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache

The certbot Let's Encrypt client is now ready to use.

Step 2 — Set Up the SSL Certificate

Generating the SSL certificate for Apache using Certbot is quite straightforward. The client will automatically obtain and install a new SSL certificate that is valid for the domains provided as parameters.
To execute the interactive installation and obtain a certificate that covers only a single domain, run the certbot command like so, where example.com is your domain:

sudo certbot --apache -d example.com

If you want to install a single certificate that is valid for multiple domains or subdomains, you can pass them as additional parameters to the command. The first domain name in the list of parameters will be the base domain used by Let’s Encrypt to create the certificate, and for that reason we recommend that you pass the bare top-level domain name as first in the list, followed by any additional subdomains or aliases:

sudo certbot --apache -d example.com -d www.example.com

For this example, the base domain will be example.com.
If you have multiple virtual hosts, you should run certbot once for each to generate a new certificate for each. You can distribute multiple domains and subdomains across your virtual hosts in any way.
After the dependencies are installed, you will be presented with a step-by-step guide to customize your certificate options. You will be asked to provide an email address for lost key recovery and notices, and you will be able to choose between enabling both http and https access or forcing all requests to redirect to https. It is usually safest to require https, unless you have a specific need for unencrypted http traffic.
When the installation is finished, you should be able to find the generated certificate files at /etc/letsencrypt/live. You can verify the status of your SSL certificate with the following link (don’t forget to replace example.com with your base domain):

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=example.com&latest

You should now be able to access your website using a https prefix.

Step 3 — Verifying Certbot Auto-Renewal

Let’s Encrypt certificates only last for 90 days. However, the certbot package we installed takes care of this for us by running certbot renew twice a day via a systemd timer. On non-systemd distributions this functionality is provided by a cron script placed in /etc/cron.d. The task runs twice daily and will renew any certificate that's within thirty days of expiration.
To test the renewal process, you can do a dry run with certbot:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run

If you see no errors, you're all set. When necessary, Certbot will renew your certificates and reload Apache to pick up the changes. If the automated renewal process ever fails, Let’s Encrypt will send a message to the email you specified, warning you when your certificate is about to expire.

Conclusion

In this guide, we saw how to install a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt in order to secure a website hosted with Apache. We recommend that you check the official Let’s Encrypt blog for important updates from time to time, and read the Certbot documentation for more details about the Certbot client

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