Are you guilty of spamming your friends? You may be, and here’s how. You discover a joke, or a humorous anecdote, or a meaningful quote, and you decide to share it with everyone on your email address list. You forget (or maybe you never heard), that if you put everyone’s address in the TO address line and click SEND, that the body of the email you send will contain all the addresses of everyone you sent the email to. By the way, if you put the addresses in the CC, or copy-to line, you’ll send all the addresses to everyone as well. Now, can a “real” spammer get at any of those email addresses from this process? Probably not, unless there’s a “closet spammer” amongst your friends. However, some people might not like having their email address sent to people they don’t know. Respect the privacy of your friends, as you would have them respect yours.

The only way to keep everyone from getting everyone else’s address is to place but one address in the TO line (for true anonymity, send it to yourself), and place the rest of the addresses in the BCC, or blind-copy-to line. If you use BCC, everyone gets an email that has but three lines in the header, instead of a lengthy list of addresses.

I’m sure you’ve received emails that have parts of several different emails inside of them. Let’s follow that trail. Someone sends a joke email to their friends, with a long list of email addresses in the body. One of the friends decides to send the email to their friends, known as “forwarding”. They click the FORWARD button on their email program (or even worse, the REPLY ALL button). A window opens with the entire original email automatically placed in the Body. They add a personal greeting like “Check out this joke, you’ll love it!” They then put their friends’ addresses in the TO or CC lines, and click SEND. Now imagine if everyone just forwarded everything. You see where this is going.

How can you combat email bloat? Use the BCC address line for your “bulk” emailings. If you receive an email that’s already bloated, take a few seconds to cut out the extraneous stuff if you plan to pass it on, or reply to it. This is especially important if you want to become a responsible member of a mail list or online forum.

Most email programs include the capability to automatically include a witty line like “On Saturday, June 26th, at 9:39 AM, Pete Zimowski did astound the known world by scribing…” at the top of the content of a REPLY email. Do you really need to include this? The same goes for “Signatures”, which email programs can affix at the end of every email you send. Some Signatures are longer than the email content itself, and may not provide the personal touch you want to end a thoughtful message with.

If you find an interesting article on a web site, why not just copy and paste the web address into a quick email, rather than copying and pasting the entire article? Let the reader view the web site on their own time, as they can just click on the link to open their browser and go to the page/site. You do the owner or developer of the web site a favor by directing traffic to the content you found valuable enough to send to other people. Plus, if you copy, paste, and send copyrighted content in an email, you’re breaking the law.

Take a little time to “clean up” your email. Your friends will love you for it.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski