This started with an email talking about how to properly forward emails. I have edited it and added some points. I hope readers, especially those fairly new to email, will find it useful.

While no longer high-tech to most Internet users, emails are an essential aspect of electronic communication. An email is cheap and fast. Unlike a phone call, the sender can compose it at a time of her choosing; the recipient is not interrupted since email (like mail and web pages) are passive in terms of the participants' involvement. An email can be sent to many recipients at once. An email can contain attachments (like a Christmas card might also have pictures of the family), can have pictures embedded in the body like a web page, and can have links to other web content. Unlike a phone call, though, mass email is forever.

Do you really know how to forward emails?  Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail?  Don't you just hate it? Every time you forward an email there is information left over from the people who received the message before you did, namely their email addresses and names. As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and all it takes is for one person to get a virus, and his 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.  Try the following if you haven't done it before.

CLEANING UP AN EMAIL TO BE FORWARDED

Start by clicking FORWARD while the email is open:

1.  START WITH THE ORIGINAL: Ever get those emails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it?   By Forwarding the original text you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open so many emails just to see what you sent.   You may have had to open numerous other pages before you got to the real forwarded message or you may found numerous versions of the same text repeated, ad infinitum, down the page. So EDIT! Either delete all but one instance of the “story” or, if the story is in an email attachment (that may be in an email attachment in an email attachment), open the deepest email attachment, then click FORWARD and send that to friends. Then delete the original email (you’ll still have the one you just forwarded as your own reference and it will be in your SENT folder.)

2. REMOVE OLD ADDRESSES FOR CLEANLINESS AND SECURITY: When you forward an email, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top of each previous mailing of the message, going on, ad infinitum, down the page). Since, in step 1 above, you deleted all the prior iterations of the same message, you only have to do this part once. Also, delete the advertisements at the bottoms of emails.

3. HIDE RECIPIENTS’ ADDRESSES: Whenever you send an email to more than one person, do not use the TO: or CC: fields for adding email addresses unless they are all people who know each other and you want them all to know who else got the email. Generally, though, it’s much better to use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field for listing ALL the email addresses.  This way, the people you send to will not see other recipients’ email addresses.  If you don't see your BCC: go to your HELP menu and search for BCC – some programs like Outlook may hide this field and you’ll only see TO: and CC: but you can tell the program to show it.

4. CLEAN UP YOUR SUBJECT! Remove any ”FW:” in the subject line.  You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling. In essence: edit the SUBJECT line to be as if this is a brand new email. Nobody needs to know it was forwarded and it’s less confusing without all those FW’s.

5. IF THERE ARE ATTACHMENTS:

• See if they are duplicates. If so, delete all but one. You’ll reduce the download time for folks with slow internet and you won’t contribute to some people’s Inboxes go over their quotas.
• People often send around videos and other files that are 5MB or bigger and yet the same video can be found on YouTube, etc. If the attachments in your email are bigger than 100kB or so (bigger than a medium-sized picture) see if you can find it on the web: if the name of the attachment is (e.g.) aBigHonkinVideo.wmv go to Google et al and search for that name and chances are you will find it online.  Sending the URL takes up a couple of Bytes – sending the whole video takes millions of Bytes.
• Don’t forward files ending in .EXE or .COM  Even MS Word and MS Excel files could be infected so only forward if you are SURE it’s clean and if you’ve scanned it first.

PETITIONS:

These emails state a position then ask you to add your name and address and forward it.  The email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses.

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.  Do not ever put your email address on any petition.

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 addresses on a petition. And don't believe the stories that say that the email is being tracked. However, keep in mind that most e-mail petitions that are forwarded with just a list of names are worthless because they do not fully identify the signer by street address, etc. An email does does not prove that the signer really signed it (it can be easily edited as we’re learning here).

Some of the other emails to delete and not forward are:

A. The ones that say something like, 'Send this email to 10 people and you'll see something great happen.'
B. And don't let the “bad luck” ones scare you either. Please do us all a favor and trash them.

C. Before you forward an  'Amber Alert', or a 'Virus Alert',  etc, check it out at

www.snopes.com
urbanlegends.about.com
www.truthorfiction.com

or look it up using a good search engine like Google or Yahoo before forwarding. Most of them are messages that have been circling the net for YEARS!

Point C above is important. Once an email intended to be passed around gets into “the wild” it’s out of control forever. It’s out of your control because people can edit it and change your intended message. It’s out of control because if the status of the subject changes over time, the email cannot be changed to reflect this or even be withdrawn. It’s like those Africanized bees that were accidentally released in South America back in 1955 and have moved north ever since. They are taking over European apian colonies and cannot be stopped. The best thing to do is to post your message on a web site, blog, etc. Anyplace public, on the Internet, that you have control of. Then just send the URL to that document to people. If your campaign to eradicate Glovner’s Disease becomes moot because it truly becomes eradicated, you can change the text of the web page thanking people for their contributions. An email asking for donations won’t continue around the internet for ever and ever. And, as mentioned, a URL takes up a couple of bytes while that long article may take up thousands multiplied by every person who gets it times all the people THEY send it to, etc. As an example, the original content for this article was posted on the web and all you really need to do is to forward

http://web.TheIdealist.net/consumer/emails.html

to your friends and not the actual text.

Finally, posting the original online means that it won’t lose its formatting as it gets forwarded each time, eventually becoming a shredded, unreadable, mess.

To send this original blog to friends, use this URL: http://www.ucan.org/blog/telecommunications/communications_technology/email_forwarding_and_etiquette