[thoughts on forwarded e-mail, revised]
ok, well it's not that easy, but it's not much harder and it doesn't take much time.
I am not so sure how everyone out there feels when they get an e-mail that has been forwarded so many times that all the little brackets, arrows, carrots or whatever those are break up the text so badly its almost impossible to follow it.
I know it annoys me so badly I often do not bother to even read whatever they felt was so great they had to pass it on to me.
It only takes a few minutes to copy the story, paste it into whatever text editor/word processing program you have and do a find/replace to get rid of the things.
This rant is purposely written with these little brackets, arrows, carrots or whatever in place to illustrate just why its annoying. Is it working? If they are annoying you, click here for an automatic clean up of this rant. If you don't wish to clean it up, skip the next paragraph and continue on...
There, isn't this better? Were you able to find your place again once you got here? If you didn't bother to clean it up, you are far more patient and probably have less of an obsession with a neat orderly environment than I.
I do have other problems with forwarding e-mail that has to do with the length of the messages reaching such outrageous proportions due to people not realizing to forward you don't need to re-copy the text. When you click Forward, the message is there, and you get a clean slate to type a quick note about why you are forwarding the message, or a brief description of what it is and why you felt the reader should enjoy it.
Then there is the matter of how easy it is for mischievous spammers to harvest a long line of e-mail addresses that are included, often with people's full names, and ip addresses that end up at the bottom of the e-mail in the routing section. Don't believe me? Simply look at the bottom of an e-mail next time and if you see the other recipients full name in brackets, copy it paste it within quotations inside a search engine and see what you get.
I found out where someone worked at a university in central records processing just by her name alone. I don't know this woman, she just seems to be in every forward I get from someone else.
Guaranteed, if you get a joke in an e-mail you can count on receiving it twenty times in the next six months. It is a vicious cycle.
Don't get me started on virus hoax / threats. Research first. Then worry. There are many, many websites who serve the purpose of de-bunking all of these ludicrous chain letters and virus hoaxes. (See Links page). Give it a shot, some of them make for interesting reading.
Thanks for your time on this matter. Happy e-mailing!_____________
11 Feb 2002- perotheus.com
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