To all my friends that send me e-mails

Please do not take offense. I only want to make everyone’s e-mail experience more enjoyable. If you already do this, you may know someone who does not. You can forward it to them. Please pay close attention to # 4. Remember I do this in love and I do not want to make anyone mad.




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 emails? 50% of us do; 50% DO NOT.

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it?

Every time you forward an email and there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their email names and addresses you are contributing to your own problem.

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 their computer can send that virus to every email address that has come across their computer.

Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk ma il to them in the hopes that you will go to some 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. Try the following if you haven't done it before:

1. DELETE PREVIOUS ADDRESSES - 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 it is 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 on 'Forward' first, you won't be able to edit the message at all.

2. USE THE BCC: OPTION FOR MULTIPLE TO: ADDRESSES - 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 email addresses. In this way, the people you send to will only see their own email address. If you don't see your BCC: option in your outgoing email message, click on where it says TO: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address 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.

3. CLEAN UP THE SUBJECT LINE - Unless you really, really want to tell the recipient you had forwarded the message, remove any 'FW' in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling.

4. DO NOT 'NEST' FORWARDED EMAILS - Ever get those emails that you have to open 10 message s in order to read the one page with the information on it? ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual email you are reading. By Forwarding from the actual message you wish someone to view, you stop them fro m having to open many emails just to see what you sent.

5. IMMEDIATELY DELETE PETITIONS - 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. A 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? And don't believe the ones that say that the email is being traced; it just ain't so!)

Some of the other emails I hate include: -
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 AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN!!!!! (Trust me, I'm still seeing some of the same emails that I waited on 10 years ago!

6. DO NOT FORWARD AMBER OR VIRUS ALERTS - Before you forward an 'Amber Alert', or a 'Virus Alert', or some of the other emails floating around nowadays, check them out before you forward them. Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for YEARS! Just about everything you receive in an email that is in question can be checked out a t Snopes or Urban Legends. Just go to www.snopes.com or www.urbanlegends.com. It's really easy to find out if it's real or not. If it's not, please don't pass it on.

7. DELETE ALL THE EXTRANEOUS GARBAGE AT THE END OF THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE - You've received them. The pertinent part of the message is two lines long. After that, there is 10 or 15 pages of 'Buy more Emoticons' or 'to subscribe to this' or 'live forever without paying taxes', etc. etc. etc. ad nauseaum. Highlight all this stuff and hit 'Delete'. Save the next poor sap from having to scan through all that stuff to make certain there isn't something relevant there.


Finally, here's an idea!!! Let's send this to everyone we know (but strip my address off first, please). This is something that SHOULD be forwarded!

 

Awesome info - thanks....I hardly forward anything yet get a lot of stuff sent to me...

Boggles my mind, stuff that I seen TEN years ago on the net is still circulating. Get some new material people....

 

Good info. Glad to say I am abiding. Suprised myself somethimes