Please Don't Spam

When people hear the word "spam" in relation to email, they probably think about "Viagra", "Enlargement", or "Fast-moving Stocks".

However, there is another form of spam, one that is often sent innocently but naively by people who might be reading this very page. Such people mean no harm, and might even think they are being helpful without realizing that they are actually causing problems for others.

Picture this. You receive an email called "God is an artist" in which someone claims that the images are all natural formations and prove that God is an artist.

A few days later, you receive another email called "God is an artist", and you notice that it is from one of the recipients of the previous email who has just blindly forwarded the message to you.

Annoying, isn't it? I think so, and that is why I would like to note a few things here.

• When you receive an email claiming something, please verify it before passing it on.
  
• If it's something unusual like "God is an artist", you can check out the details at Snopes, a treasure chest of urban legends.
  
• If it's a virus warning, then verify it at an anti-virus vendor's website first. Personally, I go to Symantec, the makers of Norton Anti-virus.
  
• If you've checked that everything is genuine, take a moment and think about your recipients. Will this benefit them, or merely clog up their mailbox?
  
• If you decide it should definitely be forwarded to everyone in your address book, then please check the original list of recipients to see if any of them are in your address book. If they are, they've already received it and don't need to see another copy.
  
• After weeding out unnecessary recipients, the next step is to strip away all the previous email addresses from the body of the message so that the recipients don't have to wade through 1001 lines of "To", "From", "Date", and "Subject" before getting to the main content of the message.
  
• Finally, put all your intended recipients in the BCC field, and then email the message to yourself. That way, you protect the identity of your recipients who may not wish to have their email address made known to everyone else, and you spare them the need to scroll down the long list of recipients before coming to the content of the message.

And if you think it's too much trouble to do all that just to forward a message, then maybe the message isn't that worthy of being forwarded after all.