Don't touch that Forward Button!!!

This was something I stumbled upon while online last night. I thought I'd post it in case I have any forward addicts out there. I agree with most of it, but I do happen to like the cutesy and interesting forwards. I don't think ALL forwards are bad, just MOST of them. :)
3 Reasons Why You Should STOP Forwarding Those Emails
July 20, 2007

I’m not a fan of email forwards. There is so much junk flowing around these days and quite frankly I don’t have time for all that.
It can be addicting, I know. You may not realize it, but there are some very good reasons why you should control yourself from hitting the Forward button, piling in a ton of email addresses in the To field and hitting send.
Before I get to some reasons why email forwards are a bad idea I thought I’d offer some practical help breaking the chains of that particular addiction. Take a listen to this little motivational aid I recorded for just to help you.
Here’s a link for those of you reading this via feed: Stop Forwarding Those Emails!
You all motivated? Great!
Now onto the reasons why you should kick the email forwarding habit.

They are Annoying
First of all you are annoying most of your friends by passing all that junk on.
It’s true. We don’t care about the cute animated cartoon with the dancing baby singing some parody of “Tiny Bubbles” in the bathtub.
I’ve got to the point with some of my friends that every time I see their name pop up I know I’m just going to hit “Delete”.
Keep in mind that a whole bunch of people out there are still using dial up and slow internet connections. The last statistic I saw was about half of the folks in the US haven’t gotten high speed yet.
I can’t tell you how annoying it was to wait for a huge attachment to download only to find it was some nonsense when I still had dial-up.
There is enough spam out there already. Don’t add to it by sending junk to all your friends.

They’re Not True
So many of the “call to action” type email forwards are simply not true. There was a time when I would go to Snopes each time I got one of those, grab the link that explained the fallacy of whatever was being passed around by my friend, and emailed it back to them.
In my circle the classic one that would come around about every four or five months was the one about Madalyn Murry O’Hare petitioning the FCC to ban Religious Broadcasting. Usually it was sent under the name of some prominent religious leader and some of my friends would get all angry about it.
Trouble is it’s completely untrue.
And before you go trashing on my religious friends as being soft headed, think about all those emails that have been forwarded to test some email tracking program that folks have passed on. You know, the ones that promise you $100 if you just forward it to 10 or more people.
Not true either. I’m just saying.
Poking around researching this, I found Break the Chain. They’ve got a good take on why you shouldn’t be forwarding on petitions, virus warnings and such. Worth poking around over there.

Helping Spam Your Friends
One of the things I learned is that all the unnecessary email forwarding out there is helping spammers. In a big way.
If a spammer gets one of those forwards, they can add everyone of those email addresses to their mailing list because they are all right there for the world to see in the body of the email.
So by hitting forward, you might be causing your friends to get more spam.
The moral of that story is this. If you can’t overcome the compulsion to forward stuff to bunches of your friends, at the very least use the BCC function and Blind Carbon Copy them all. that way their email addresses are hidden and the only one the spammers will see is yours.
Which might even be considered by some to be a touch of justice. That way the person doing the unnecessary forwarding is the same one getting the spam in return!
There you have it. Three good reasons why you should STOP forwarding all those emails.


Written by Chris · Filed Under Personal Growth, Tech Tips