Yesterday I got a forwarded e-mail about the evils of e-mail forwards (exception: the forwarded e-mail is not evil if it clearly warns about the evils of e-mail forwards). While I do not consider forwarded e-mail to be a pet peeve, I do consider them to be, well, a bit forward (presumptuous, impertinent, or bold as in a rude, forward child).
Forwarded e-mails tell us what to eat, what not to wear, how to wash our hands, and how to celebrate our holidays. They warn of obscure deadly brain-eating amoebas and include pictures of notorious plumber's crack. They spread rumors of mutant chickens and dangerous chinchillas. At the end of the message, they command us to spread the word or we will almost die a horrible death and, barely surviving, we will live in excruciating pain and agony for decades to come. If we do send them off to 10 people we pretend to love, then angels will sing hymns over us and our every wish will come true as if we lived in a Disney movie.
Since I can not, in good conscience, forward the "do not forward" e-mail, I will blog it. By e-mailing your friends and telling them to visit Mockazine.com, not only do you give them the message to stop sending you e-junk, but they also get to peruse almost 100 other e-junk posts.
Here are the rules to good forwarding:
1. Don't forward unless it is important: While the video of the monkey who scratches his butt and sniffs his finger is surely funny, it is not worthy of sending forward. If your friends are into monkeys that way, they certainly have already found the video. As a matter of fact, you should make a note of which people send you which forwards. You might think that the perfect gift for Uncle Mike is a new sweater when he really wants a new monkey . . .
2. Consider the dictionary definition of "important": Contrary to popular belief, important does not mean funny, silly, stupid, wasteful of time, or chain-letter. As a matter of fact, if any portion of the e-mail indicates that it is a chain letter, it is automatically disqualified from being important. If you are looking for funny stuff on the internet, check out a humor blog.
3. Instead of "CC", use "BCC": Instead of Coffee Cake, have Bavarian Creme Cake and instead of putting your entire address book in the Carbon Copy (CC) field so some unscrupulous internet hacker can sell their address to the guy who sends out misspelled viagara e-mails, trojan viruses, and assorted spam, use the Blind Carbon Copy field and protect the identities of your friends, family, and business associates.
4. Validate Urban Legends before you send them: Of course you don't want your friends to think you are an insensitive jerk because you won't forward an e-mail to make a bed-ridden cancer-stricken childs last wish come true. Instead, your friends will think you are a jerk because you haven't figured out that the child was was never bed-ridden in the first place and suffers untold humiliation because of a billion e-mails about him that never actually accomplished anything. What is better than helping find a missing child through an amber alert? Helping to find a child who is actually missing and on Amber alert.
How can you find out if your particular favorite Urban Legend is true or false? The internet has a lot of good resources, like Urbanlegends.com and Snopes.com
5. Cut the C.R.A.P.: Before you send that precious gem of internet goodness, delete the following information from your forward:
- C - characters like these >>> build up as e-mails forward. No body wants to read them, so delete them.
- R - registry information like what server sent what e-mail when. I don't know if it is actually called registry information, but I needed an "R".
- A - addresses from every known e-mail user on earth seem to pile up in forwarded mail. Get rid of it. No one needs to know Aunt Margaret's e-mail address unless she personally wants to give it to them. Besides, you don't need Aunt Margaret ordering viagara from Russia over the internet.
- P - post script information like e-mail footers. Yahoo mail may be great, but I already have an e-mail account or I never would have recieved your stupid forward.
6. When in doubt, see rule 1.
