E-Mail Etiquette

Submitted by HOST GFS Acadian@aol.com

E-mail etiquette is a touchy subject with some people. This is not meant as an insult to anyone. The purpose is to help people practice common courtesy.

We all are busy these days and sometimes we get in a hurry to send a joke, poem or a story to family and friends. You hit the "forward" button on your mail program and it's on the way in a short time. Trouble is when you do that, you are sending the names of others who were on that mail and without their permission. Forwarded mail also comes with the little arrows for each time it has been forwarded. After awhile, those arrows break the sentences apart and you have something that is unreadable. There are two ways to clean these up very quickly. One, is using the Replace feature in WordPad. The other is a small freebie that you can get that will not only clean up those forward arrows, but also reformat the letter. Elneato!

It really doesn't take that much extra time to run your mouse across the body of the letter, select copy, and paste it into a new email. Then you enter your addresses into the fields, hit send and, voilla! It's on it's way. Unless you are sending it to a group of friends in an E-mail round and expect to receive comments back, then you should use BCC for the names of the people on your list. It protects them and stops a lot of Spam.

"BCC" can be done two ways: First, each name and address in a pair of parenthesis, separated by a comma. (Jane Doe), (John Smith), The second method is to insert all the names in double parenthesis separated by commas. ((Jane Doe, John Smith)) These are for AOL users. Most Internet mail programs allow you to send mail as BCC, CC, with a drop down window.

Those cute little get-rich-quick schemes that insist on you forwarding to all your list with the addresses of people you don't know, are a method of gathering names to sell to spammers for porno and hackers mail. I've yet to hear of anyone I know getting a check by following the instructions! They may get more porno mail, but no checks. The same holds true for those chain letters asking for prayers or promising that a Corporation will donate so much money to some cause for each name you send it to. It's a hoax, and again a way to gather names for Spam.

When the forward, forward, forwards get too long, then some mail programs will turn it into a download file. Do not download anything that you are not expecting, not even a text file. Delete it or forward such things to TOSmail (one), TOSspam, TOSfiles.....and to the government address that tracks down hackers and spammers, uce@ftc.gov

The point? Your name on an E-mail is spread out all over the Internet. In forwarded mail with YOUR name, can be sent to 50 or more people that you never heard of! Can you imagine how many more people that that letter was sent to by those 50 or so names?

A little bit of math might make it clearer. One letter gets forwarded to 5 people. Those 5 forward to 5 more. That's 25. Those 25 forward the letter to another 5 bringing it to a total of 125. Those 125 to another 5 each. We are now up to 625 times the mail has been forwarded. Now if those are forwarded another 5 times, the total is 3,125. Now multiply it by another 5 and it's up to a mind boggling 15,625 times! BCC would protect some of those people, but if it wasn't used then, 15,625 people have their names spread out across the Internet and up for grabs to Spammers.

Please use E-mail etiquette when you send mail over the Internet. Don't forward, don't use someone else's name and address without permission. Copy and Paste into new E-mails, use BCC for your mail whenever possible. If you don't know how to do these simple things, then go to the Help Files of your Windows or mail program and follow the instructions.

Hackers delight in these forwarded mails. They embed an address that sends all these names back to them. They send out virus programs that wreak havoc with our lives, disrupting service and turning the harmless into something harmful. Don't play into their hands anymore. Practice safe computing and E-mail Etiquette.

Your E-mail name and address are for your use, not the use of hundreds of unknowns out there. We send things out to share with others, but you expect others to honor your request and not forward it with your name or the names of others. Send most of your E-mail out BCC to protect YOUR friends and all those that you correspond with.

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