How to send email....

As I said yesterday, I was going to give you a little advice on sending emails. Good to read and make a hard copy for reference...Follow instructions and it will reduce your spam and virsuses. Well here goes:

First things first...when you get something in email, before forwarding it to everyone in you address book, check it out with snopes.com just like I did yesterday here on the blog. We are a naive world (don't tell me otherwise) and we believe just about everything we read whether in the newspaper, magazines, the web, or email. Just remember check out snopes.com first.

By the way...Snopes is the service that validate rumors etc on the web. Whether they are true or not. In fact, just go visit snopes sometimes and check out all of the amazing rumors that are on there from the ones I am getting ready to mention to rumors about Disney movies. And they do tell you true, false, or mix of both and MORE IMPORTANTLY WHY.

Also before you forward something (or reply to something) check who all it was sent to when it was sent to you. Chances are it was a mass mailing to everyone in someone's address book and you may be sending it to the same people again. Also, if you need to reply, make sure you need everyone to read it before you hit reply all. If you only want the person sending it to you to read it, make sure to just hit reply. I know many a person who has been super embarrassed by hitting reply all.

Now:
If you are going to pass something along . . let it be THIS!:

To whom it all concerns: Just a word to the wise. E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other municipality. To be acceptable, petitions must have a signed signature and full address.

Same with 'prayer chains' -- be wary! Almost all e-mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards.

All it was, and all this type of e-mail is, is to get names and 'cookie' tracking info for telemarketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own purposes. Any time you see an e-mail that says forward this on to '10' of your friends, sign this petition, or you'll get good luck, or what ever, it has either an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to, the host sender is getting a copy. Each time it gets forwarded, then it's able to get lists of 'active' e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to others that do. Please forward this notice to others and you will be providing a good service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting 30,000 spam e-mails in the future. (If you have been sending out the above kinds of email, now you know why you get so much spam!) Check it out: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm

Additional information that will help in forwarding emails:

IMPORTANT!! HOW TO FORWARD EMAIL APPROPRIATELY
A friend who is a computer expert received the following directly from a system administrator for a corporate system. It is an excellent message that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send e-mails. Please read the short letter below, even if you're sure you already follow proper procedures. Do you really know how to forward e-mails? 50% of us do; 50% DO NOT. 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 is the way the people you send to will only see their own e-mail address. If you don't see your BCC: option click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that's it, it's that easy. When you send to BCC: 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.

this is a big one to me!!:
(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 email 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 email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses. FACT: 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. 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 email address on a petition.
(Actually, if you think about it, who's supposed to send the petition in to whatever cause it supports? And don 't believe the ones that say that the email is being traced, it just aint so!)

(6) One of the main ones I hate is the ones that say that something like, 'Send this email to 10 people and you'll see something great run across your screen.' Or, sometimes they'll just tease you by saying something really cute will happen. IT AINT GONNA HAPPEN!!!!! (Trust me, I'm still seeing some of the same ones that I waited on 10 years ago!) I don't let the bad luck ones scare me either, they get trashed. (Could be why I haven't won the lottery??)

(7) Before you forward an Amber Alert, or a Virus Alert, or some of the other ones floating around nowadays, check them out. Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for YEARS! Just about everything you receive in an email that is in question can be checked out at Snopes. Just go tohttp://www.snopes.com/. Remember, if you haven't already heard it on the news, it most likely isn't true.

It's really easy to find out if it's real or not. If it's not, please don't pass it on. So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses.

Finally, here's an idea!!! Let's send this to everyone we know (but strip my address off first, please). This is something that SHOULD be forwarded.


(However, this is not to stop you from sending jokes, videos, or PowerPoint presentations to make others feel happy or Patriotic or share the love of God, or just for a good laugh...this is intended to instruct you how to do it properly. Take off the share with 10 people, strip off all the info that is mentioned above, send it to yourself, then forward it on. Hopefully, if we all do the things mentioned above, email will be even more pleasant to receive, especially when coming from a dear friend or family member!!)