Let’s face it: At some point, all of us will have to forward an e-mail message. Maybe it’s a chain letter(heaven forbid). Perhaps it’s a company memo that needs to be sent to your underlings. Maybe it’s just a very cool fact-oid that you thought you’d share with all the people you’ve ever known - including your fourth-grade teacher.
We’ve all been annoyed by forwarded messages that have grown and multiplied due to several previous forwardings. A 10k message is now 10 gigs long, and most of it is garbage - other e-mail addresses, repeated content, et cetera.
So, here are some suggestions that you can try the next time you’re bound and determined to mass-mail something that was in your mailbox. These ideas and’common courtesies’ generally make your recipient more open to the actual message: If they don’t see a botched-up, long, annoying e-mail, they’ll get to the actual content with fewer obscenities.
1. Don’t send it as an attachment. Virus scares are everywhere despite the fact that we all know how to protect ourselves. Even if you’re forwarding a virus scare message, be sure it’s not an attachment. That way more people will read your message instead of assuming the worst and simply trashing it.
2. Try to delete as much of the unnecessary content as possible. Many forwarded e-mails have a lot of unwanted junk from past forwardings - for example, a lot of e-mail software shifts the e-mail headers into the body of the message. Who cares that fifteen million people received it before it was passed along to you? Highlight all of the junk and hit the’Delete’ button: Your readers will thank you for it!
3. Ask yourself if the reader will enjoy it as much as you did. If your recipients receive tons of e-mails every day, sending them a bunch of forwards that contain nothing more than cute jokes or puns may just prompt them to block all further messages from your e-mail account. However, sending a few’really good ones’ every now and then is certainly no crime!
If you follow these practices, the resentment level among your peers and colleagues will most likely drop, and you might even receive some awesome forwards in exchange. The Internet - especially e-mail - is a great place to go for information, and forwarding well-written, neat, edited, messages to each other is a wonderful way of exchanging the ideals in our minds. Don’t abuse it!