(Approx. 907 words)

How to Forward Email
By Vinny La Bash, a member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., Florida 
www.spcug.org
vlabash(at)comcast.net 

Obtained from APCUG with the author's permission for publication by APCUG member groups.

Let’s examine a typical email scenario.  After opening your email, you find a message that you simply must share with all your friends.  You press the “Forward” button and one way or another get all their email addresses in the “To:” box.  Feeling quite satisfied after pressing the “Send” button, you sit back and take satisfaction in the joy you are sending to others.    

You should be ashamed of yourself.  You have just exposed everyone on your mailing list plus any people who received the email ahead of you to unending streams of spam, spyware, viruses, and other assorted electronic junk and mischief that hackers are prone to these days.  What you have done is prove conclusively that you don’t have a clue about the proper way to forward email.  Your license to compute should be revoked immediately.  

As messages get forwarded in this way they move along the internet, and the list of email addresses embedded in the note gets longer and longer.  All it takes is for just one of these folks to get a virus or some other kind of malware, and everyone who has their email address in that list can be infected.  

Anyone can take those email addresses, sell them or send out their own junk mail.  Assuming you are a mature responsible adult, you most likely would not want to harm anyone, even inadvertently.  What does a conscientious person do to stop or better yet, prevent damage?

When you click the “Forward” button you enter the edit mode of your email client.  Before you do anything else DELETE all the other email addresses appearing at the top of the message.  Let me repeat.  DELETE them by highlighting them and THEN pressing the Delete button on your keyboard.  It doesn’t take long.  When you’ve finished, delete any other junk that isn’t actually part of the message, such as information about the original sender.  Delete anything that is not part of what you want to send.  

If you’re sending the message to more than one person, do not use the To: or Cc: fields for adding email addresses.  Always, always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the email addresses.  The people receiving the message will see only their own address.

Some email clients don’t automatically show the blind carbon copy option.  If that’s the case, click on where it says To: and your address list will appear.  Highlight the email address and choose the BCC: option.  It’s not much effort, and it eliminates the possibility of someone using the email addresses inappropriately.  When you send using the blind carbon copy, everyone receiving the message will see “Undisclosed Recipients” in the heading information.  

If your email client requires that something be in the To: field, send the message to yourself and use the BCC: field for everyone else.  

Remove any FW in the subject line.  Better yet, clean up the subject line completely by fixing any spelling or grammatical mistakes.  Why let someone else’s errors appear as your own?  

Sometimes you will receive an email that is a petition.  It states a position and directs you to add your name, address, and sometimes other information.  Then you’re supposed to send it to as many people as possible.  If enough people do this, an email can contain hundreds if not thousands of names and addresses.  

The longer the list gets the more valuable it becomes to a spammer or hacker because the names and email addresses are valid.  If you really want to support the idea behind the petition, a personal letter to the eventual recipient carries a lot more weight than a piece of paper with a long list of names.  When you think about it, lists like these can be generated from telephone books.  Do you really think that a member of congress is going to pay attention to something that could be so easily faked?  

Sometimes these petitions come with statements or warnings that the emails are being traced.  Don’t believe it.  While technology is constantly improving, there is still no way to trace emails through the internet.  

One kind of really annoying email is the one that promises that something wonderful is going to happen, but only if I forward the message to at least ten people in the next ten minutes.  However, if I fail to do so, some unspeakable evil will surely befall me.  I always fail to do so, and nothing bad has happened yet, but I wonder if this could be the reason I haven’t won the lottery.  

Before forwarding some version of an Amber Alert, take a little time to check out the story behind the message.  Most of these messages have been circulating around the internet for years.  Some of them have been around for a decade.  Almost all of them are much less than they seem.  

Some sites that will help:

www.hoaxbusters.com
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/a/current_netlore.htm 
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/h-05.shtml 
http://www.snopes.com/snopes.asp 
http://www.vmyths.com/ 

You may not be able to stop this stuff on your own, but you can stop contributing to it.  
This article has been provided to APCUG by the author solely for publication by APCUG member groups. All other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).