It’s that time of the year again. Time to resolve to make the coming year better than the last. Statistics show that 40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. The most popular are (in no particular order) losing weight, exercising more, quitting smoking, reducing debt, and managing money better.

Statistics also show that, over time, resolutions are broken. Roughly 25% fall by the wayside in the first two weeks. By July of the year, over half of our resolutions are shelved, waiting to rise to the top of the list again the following year. However, even more statistics show that people who explicitly make resolutions are ten times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t.

Here are some easy-to-succeed-at email resolutions that will make your personal computing world a better and safer place in 2006. Raise your mouse into the air with your right hand and repeat after me.

I resolve to do my part to reduce email bloat and protect the identities and email addresses of my recipients. If I send a “bulk” email to a number of people, I resolve to address it TO myself, then place the other addressees in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field. By doing so all the recipients won’t see the email addresses of all the other recipients.

I further resolve that if I receive an email message from someone who has already broken the above resolution, I will do my part by deleting the long list of previous recipients from the body of the email before I forward it to anyone else.

In that same vein, I also resolve to clean out other irrelevant information from email messages I forward. Things like inane signatures, advertising from “free” email services (like “Do You Yahoo?” or “Try Juno Platinum for Free!”), assurances from anti-virus software that “no viruses were found in this incoming message”, and meaningless date/time groups. I also resolve to remove “end of forwarded message” from the end of the forwarded message.

>I resolve to decrease the quote level
>of text in the body of forwarded messages.
>thereby removing the “>” characters,
>bizarre
>formatting, and multi-colored text
>that renders what I considered important
>unreadable.

Quote levels have their place in distinguishing “threads” in a string of related messages, but if they “do not fit, you must omit”.

I also resolve to modify the Subject of email I forward to accurately reflect the subject of the email I forward. I will not send emails with Subjects like “Re:Re:Re”. I will also refrain from attaching the “Very High Priority” tag to messages that are not really “Very High Priority”.

In the coming year I will do some research at www.snopes.com before forwarding the latest bizarre rumor or warning to all of my friends. And, no, Virginia, hanging a CD from your car’s rear-view-mirror or placing aluminum foil in your hubcaps will not fool police radar. However, the video circulating of the amazing animated Christmas lights display, synchronized to “Wizards in Winter” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, is for real. The display was constructed in 2004 by Carson Williams of Mason, Ohio, and had to be shut down before Christmas this year because of traffic congestion in the neighborhood. But, I digress.

Finally, this year I resolve to trim unwanted pounds from my email program by exporting the text from individual messages into text files then deleting the messages themselves, and deleting messages containing attached images and documents when I have previously removed the images or documents and stored them elsewhere on my computer.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski