Cover letter as a attachment or as the email?

 If we accept that the purpose of the cover letter is to convince the reader to read the resume, then it makes sense to put it in the body of the email.  You want the cover letter read with as little friction as possible.  It needs to be convincing enough to overcome the friction of opening an attachment.

  Good luck!
--Michael

I would consider copying and pasting your resume and cover letter into the body of the mail. The reason is that many managers read these emails via smart phone. Smart phones often do not like attachments. The less effort to read your docs, the better for you.

I always prefer to see the cover letter as the body of the e-mail.  It allows me to filter out a few people without even opening the resume (way too much experience, way too little experience, borderline illiterate, more deranged than even I'm willing to tolerate) and then I can organise whose I'm going to dig into first based on whether the cover letter speaks to me.  It also helps to "introduce" the resume, and you can pretty much guarantee that anyone who is actually working from the e-mails (rather than, say, through printed resumes or an applicant tracking system) *will* read the body of the e-mail before opening the resume (whereas a cover letter as a separate attachment stands the chance of being overlooked or ignored).  There is huge value in addressing any potential point of confusion in your resume in the cover letter -- for instance, the number of people I see from overseas applying for a job, but who don't indicate in *any* way that they understand that and are willing to relocate, is astonishing.

I can see the merits of putting the cover letter in as "page 0" of the resume attachment, although it would negate my ability to "quick filter" and sort... whether that's a negative or a positive for you would depend on whether you fall into any one of my "quick filter" categories...

At the risk of being redundant...

The cover letter should be attached and it should be a separate attachment alongside the resume; two full attachments included in the email.

There are more than a few reasons for this.

1) Often your email is received by an HR professional. And often as not, the body of the email is not forwarded to the hiring manager. This is especially true of companies with the HR department in another geographic location. If you seriously want the cover letter in the hands of the hiring manager, do no risk her missing this critical piece of your preparation.

2) The cover letter should have exactly the same header as the resume. Many email systems will thrash the format of your carefully prepared verbiage and it does not come across as you intended. Don't risk it.

3) Some modern resume scanning software has a place to upload the cover letter. Guess what? If the file does not exist, no one is going to take the added time you decided to save, just to create the file for you. Don't risk being set aside as a result.

4) Many times an HR professional will print out your resume and the cover letter for the hiring manager's use. Do you really want your printed cover letter looking like an email with date/time subject line, etc? Don't risk this happening.

5) All of your correspondence should be carefully assembled and fully checked by spelling/grammar tools. Email editing software is not so complete as true word processing software. Even if you have MS Word and MS Outlook software linked together on your computer, you do not get the full functionality of MS Word when editing an email. Don't risk it.

6) If you encounter a web service asking for both cover letter and resume through a copy & paste, be certain it has been passed through a true word processor and converted to plain text before pasting. Then scroll through the online result in the web form, top to bottom before hitting the submit. Do this a couple of times and look for errors in content and format. Bulleted lists often render badly. Any needed changes should be corrected in the word processor and pasted again in its entirety. The chances of failure in a web form are actually very high. Don't risk failure of acceptance for a technical glitch.

Finally, only you are responsible to ensure the resume and cover letter make it into the hiring manager's hand in the format you intended. Do not cut corners.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/dougp01

 Lot of good advice here.

What I have done, for E-mails, is create a PDF file that has the resume first, and cover letter second. Then I attached it to the E-mail, and include the text of the cover letter in the body. So this way, if reading the E-mail, they see the cover letter, then open the resume, and perhaps have the cover letter at the end. It worked for getting my wife an interview.

So if you attach a "cover" letter to the e-mail...what's the e-mail?  A cover-cover letter?  

The e-mail IS the cover letter.  IF I got an e-mail from someone about a job, and I decide I'm interested, the FIRST thing I'm going to do is look at the resume...NOT the attached "cover" letter.

And if I open a resume file and see a "cover letter", I might just move on to the next resume.

If you're sending to someone you know, even better reason to NOT attach a generic cover letter...send them a personal e-mail.  

-Jazz

I been successful with a variant of ArtSmith222' solution.

Text of cover letter in the body of the email, and attached pdf files for the resume, and similarly formatted coverletter.