Tips for forwarding email

The following tip was sent in by Anne who is one of our subscribers. We thought it was an excellent article about one of the most misused of all email functions – forwarding email. Thanks Anne. Very well done!

Do you really know how to forward e-mails?

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it? Every time you forward an e-mail 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 E-mail 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 e-mail, 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) Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the To: or Cc: fields for adding e-mail addresses. Always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This way your recipients will only see their own e-mail address, not anyone else’s. If you don’t see your BCC in Outlook Express/Windows Mail, click View in the compose window toolbar and check “All Headers”. In other email programs try clicking on where it says To: and your address list will appear – then highlight the address and choose BCC: and that’s it, it’s that easy. When you send to BCC: (and with no address in the “To:” field) your message will automatically say “Undisclosed Recipients in the “TO:” field of the people who receive it.

(3) Remove any “FW :” in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling.

(4) ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual e-mail you are reading. Ever get those e-mails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual page you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open many e-mails just to see what you sent.-

(5) Have you ever gotten an e-mail 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 e-mail can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and e-mail 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 e-mail 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 e-mail 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 e-mail is being traced, it just ain’t so!)

Just about everything you receive in an e-mail that is in question can be checked out on Snopes.com. Just go to www.snopes.com or www.truthorfiction.com It’s really easy to find out if it’s real or not. If it’s not, please don’t pass it on.