How to forward Email Appropriately

  

A friend who is a computer expert received the following directly from a system administrator for a corporate system. It is an excellent message that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send emails.

Do you really know how to forward e-mails? Most of us DO NOT know how.

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail?

Do you hate it as much as I do?

Every time you forward an email there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses & names.  As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for some poor sap to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every email address that has come across his computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel!

How do you stop it? Well, there are several easy steps:

(1) When you forward an email, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top). That's right, DELETE them.  Highlight them and delete them, backspace them, cut them, whatever you know how to do. It only takes a second. You MUST click the 'Forward' button first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and headers of the message. If you don't click the forward button first you won't have full editing functions. I particularly dislike having to scroll through 200 Email addresses before I get to the email.

(2) Whenever you send an email to more than one person, do NOT use the TO: or CC: fields for adding email addresses. Always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This is the way the people you send to will only see their own e-mail address. This applies to all email, New, Reply and Forwards.  ALWAYS USE THE BCC: FIELD.  You don't have to put any addresses in the TO: or CC: fields in order to send the message.

If you don't see your BCC: option, click on the box marked TO: and your address list will appear. Highlight the addresses you want to forward to and choose BCC: and that's it, it's that easy. When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say 'Undisclosed Recipients' in the 'TO:' field of the people who receive it.  That way you aren't sharing all those addresses with every Tom, Dick or Harry.

(3) Remove any 'FW:' in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling. I often put a new title on the message just to get rid of  FW: or RE: and any other addendum that appears on the message I received.

This one is very important, so please read and heed

(4) ALWAYS use your Forward button from the actual screen you are reading.  Ever get those emails that you have to open 10 attachments to read the one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual attachment you wish someone to view, you relieve them from having to open many attachments just to see what you sent. These are the ones that often end up having picked up a virus from somebody along the way.

To clarify, once you have gotten to the attachment window where the actual information is, click on the Forward button from there without closing pages back to the first one.  In the case of attachments where it is a video, or pictures, or any graphics, close the attachment and then immediately click on the Forward button. The attachment will still be on your forwarding email, and you can edit the body of the message before sending it.

NOTE: If your email attachments come up as a pop up screen with no menu bar, send me an email to that effect and I'll detail another way you can forward from the attachment message page.

(5) A message that has been forwarded several times will often have vertical blue lines along the left edge with the text or graphics moved to the right of those lines.  When that is the case, it is better to copy and paste only the part of that page you wish to forward in a new message.  It requires a few extra steps, but it is much neater and the message will appear to have been originated by you instead of forwarded.  Just highlight the text you wish to send, depress and hold ctrl+C, close the current message, start a new message and depress and hold ctrl+V to paste the text into the message body. Now you have a clean copy without any of those email addresses, vertical lines or other unwanted distractions.

(6) Have you ever gotten an email that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10 or 15 people or your entire address book. The email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses.

FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient. Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and email address on a petition. (Actually, if you think about it, who is supposed to send the petition in to whatever cause it supports? Where do they send it? And don 't believe the ones that say that the email is being traced, it just isn’t so!)

(7) One of the worst offenders is the one that says something like, 'Send this email to 10 people and you'll see something great run across your screen.' Or, sometimes they'll just tease you by saying something really cute will happen.  IT ISN’T GONNA HAPPEN!!!!!  Trust me, I'm still seeing some of the same ones that I waited on 10 years ago!  I don't let the bad luck ones scare me either; they get trashed.

(8) Before you forward an Amber Alert, or a Virus Alert, or some of the other ones floating around nowadays, check them out.  Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for Years!  Most will be inaccurate or completely false.  Just about everything you receive in an email that is in question can be checked out at Snopes. Just go to http://www.snopes.com.  It’s really easy to find out if it is real or not. If it's not, please don't pass it on.

So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses.  Follow the eight steps above and clean ‘em up prior to forwarding.