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Hey! Don't Be So Forward!
How to
deal with "friendly" spam
How
can you tell a Web e-mail newbie? They’re just so "forward"! Okay,
that’s a bit lame, but it does make a valid point. Someone new to e-mail and
the Web often erupt in a forwarding frenzy. What they intend as a blessing or
simple pleasantry is often a nuisance for the recipients.
Forwarding
schmaltzy inspirational notes, cheesy motivational stories, chain messages,
spurious virus warnings, fabrications, rumors, and urban legends wastes
bandwidth and time. Most are just plain awful while many are outright lies or
frauds.
If you
must forward something, take the time to do it with care. Follow these six tips:
1.
Check the validity of the message! Don’t pass on rumors and hoaxes!
Check out the facts. It’s easy to do. Simply copy a sentence or phrase from
the message and then paste it into any search field of nearly any search site
such as Google or AltaVista, and then look through the results. Excellent online
resources for ferreting out hoaxes are listed at the end of this article.
2.
Don’t feed the spammers! Delete all the forwarded e-mails and headers
from the message! Don’t forward accumulated e-mail addresses of strangers to
your friends so they can forward them onto their friends and they can forward
them to their friends. Eventually, these forwarded messages will get sent to
spammers who will harvest every e-mail address for their junk e-mail lists.
3.
Don’t send ugly messages! Copy the message from your e-mail and paste
it into a clean Word (or other word processing application) document. Reformat
and clean up the entire message. Get rid of all those annoying >> marks
and delete extra spaces between words. Also, put all of the
broken lines
back
together. Fix spelling errors. Delete all extraneous text and any potentially
offensive words or references.
4.
Make it personal and new! Write a brief introduction to the message
explaining to your friends why you thought they would like to get this message.
Tell them what it means to you. Create a new message in your e-mail application.
Copy the text (your personal note and the e-mail text) from your word processing
document and paste it into the body of your new message.
5.
Give it a good name! Put a short but descriptive label in the SUBJECT
field. (Never send any e-mail without a subject!)
6.
Send it blind! Put all of the e-mail addresses of your friends into the
BCC: field. This will eliminate a huge header in your sent message, as well as
keep everyone’s e-mail address private. Put your own e-mail address in the TO:
field.
Does all
this seem like too much trouble? If so, then don’t bother forwarding the
message! If it’s not worth your time to clean up the message for your friends,
then it’s not worth their time to read it. The bottom line is simply, don’t
forward unto others what you wouldn’t want forwarded to you.
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