CharltonRose.com: Sharky's preferences:
by Charlton Rose
If I could waive a magic wand to make everyone do email my way --
I wouldn't do it. Your freedom is more important than my convenience, and I certainly do not want to scare you out of ever corresponding with me! Still, here are my email preferences, and if you choose to respect them, you will have my gratitude, but you are welcome to write me even if you don't.
Most people using Cc to send an email to several recipients at once don't realize that in addition to sharing the message, they are also disclosing each of the recipient's email addresses. If this is truly your intention, then by all means use Cc. Most of the time, however, Bcc (blind Cc) is a better choice. Bcc recipients will still receive the message, but the fact that they did will not be revealed to the other recipients, thus preserving their sacred right to control the distribution of their email address.
Next time, before you use Cc instead of Bcc, ask yourself the following questions:
Note that there is almost no technical difference between To and Cc. These tags only serve to document and clarify your intent in sending the message. Also, many people don't understand that it is perfectly acceptable to generate an email without a To recipient. Next time you want to forward a joke to everyone in your address book, leave the To and Cc fields blank, but put all of their addresses in Bcc instead.
And, of course, if you are ever at a commercial web site that asks for the addresses of your friends, please do not oblige them. If you do, you most likely will be adding your friend -- soon to be your not-friend -- to the company's spam list, and to the spam lists of all their partners, and so on.
Here are some examples:
Am I paranoid? Not really. I just hate spam.
Obviously, there are times when you must enter your friend's email address into a web site. Notable examples include web-based email such as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Just use your discretion and avoid sharing your friends' addresses with strangers whenever you can.
And finally, never post your friends' email addresses on a public web page without their consent. The spammers will quickly harvest and abuse them.
Often, your friends will receive dirty jokes or inspiring stories in the mail and then forward them on to all their friends. Those friends will also do the same, and so on, and so on. Most people don't realize the exponential nature of this process and assume that all of their recipients don't mind receiving these impersonal, forwarded email messages.
There's a theory that if you consider all of the people you know, and then all of the people that they know, and so on, that every human being on the planet is connected to every other human being on the planet by at most 8 associations. Think about what this means for hardcore internet users who heavily utilize email for both work and play. These internet oldtimers have so many email connections that there is a really good chance they have already seen your message. (Unfortunately, such email never begins with "Stop me if you've heard this one....")
Several years ago, I noticed an interesting pattern in my incoming viral email. Whenever a certain one of my college friends forwarded a joke to me, the same joke would arrive again in my inbox a week later, the second time from my mother. I never did trace the distribution chain, but it was obvious that there was some sort of connection between my friend and my mother. The internet can be a remarkably small world sometimes.
Before you blindly forward an email to everyone in your address book, ask yourself whether each recipient really wants to receive it. If you didn't write it, maybe they don't want to read it. Maybe the message is only appropriate for half of your audience? Use discretion.
You can almost always identify a forwarded email by the artifacts that attach themselves to the message as it procreates through cyberspace. These "cyberbarnacles" manifest themselves as long lists of headers and footers that consume disk space but contribute nothing to the content. The headers sometimes contain the names and email addresses of hundreds of strangers -- unsuspecting victims of their friends' reckless email address sharing practices. Unfortunately, those victim's identities remain permanently entombed in the messages as the joke becomes immortalized through a frenzy of thoughtless but well-intentioned forwarding.
Have you ever wondered why you receive so much spam? Those jerks got your email address from somewhere, you know!
The footer barnacles usually contain the senders' contact information, including phone numbers, instant messaging addresses, legal disclaimers, etc. The original senders attached that information as a courtesy to their own recipients. However, they never suspected that those recipients would just willy nilly forward the same message to everyone else, footer and all. Poor fools.
Even more annoying than the accumulated headers and footers are the cancerous forwarding marks that clutter the left margin of the forwarded content, which often make the message very difficult to read:
> > > > > > > Mary had a little lamb. > > > > Her father shot it dead. > > > > > Now she takes her lamb to school > > > > > Between two chunks of bread.
How, may I ask, do these embellishments enhance the experience of receiving a forwarded joke?
But wait, there's more! Also provided, for your reading pleasure, is a long lists of repeated footer advertisements, over which the sender generally has no control:
> > > > _____ > > > > Get free email on the web at xyz-company.com! > > > _____ > > > Get free email on the web at xyz-company.com! > > _____ > > Get free email on the web at xyz-company.com! > _____ > Get free email on the web at xyz-company.com! _____ Get free email on the web at xyz-company.com!
Of course, if you are using free email, there's nothing you can do to stop these advertisements from stowing away in your own email. However, you can still trim the ads from incoming messages before you forward them on again.
Remember, if you absolutely must pass along a piece of "I didn't write it but you must read it!" email to all of your friends, take the time first to at least clean it up. Scrape off the barnacles. Trim the fat. And don't add any of your own junk if you can possibly avoid it!
Oh, if I could have a penny for each message I have received with the following subject header:
Re: Re: Re: Re: (no subject)
Aaarrrggghhh! Since two people carrying on an email dialog frequently start their messages using the Reply command, the "Re:" prefixes in the subject line can really stack up. ("Fw:" prefixes also do this. Remember the barnacles?) Also, since in the course of a protracted email dialog the subject might digress, think about updating that subject tag from time to time. It will help your friend to quickly locate your message if ever he or she ever needs to find it later.
Never, never, never send a message without a subject line! And if the subject line is generated automatically (for example, when replying), at least look it over to make sure it's appropriate.
Heavyweight email messages are a real drag. If you are on the receiving side and using a slow modem connection, you can find yourself stuck in a long download before you know what's going on. And you thought you were just going to take 1 minute to download your mail! Hah! If you are on the sending side, you may also incur your friend's wrath by exceeding his inbox size limits, causing his other friend's messages to bounce.
Occasionally, you have no choice but to send someone a huge chunk of data. In those cases, just do it. Usually, however, there is another way. Think creatively.
For example, if you find a large file on the web (such as an image, a program, or a document), and you want to share it, don't just email that file to your friend. Instead, point him to it. Send him the URL. Not only are you saving his bandwidth and time, but you are also giving him the file's context, making the sharing experience even more fulfilling.
Did you know that binary data, such as found in images and software, when sent via email, can theoretically expand to twice its normal size? This is due to technical limitations in the email exchange protocol, which was designed originally for text only messages. Whenever possible, send a pointer to the object, rather than the object itself.
You can also help out by using plain text whenever it is reasonable. At a company I used to work for, the CTO (that's Chief Technical Officer) frequently demonstrated his incompetence by sending simple messages as attached Microsoft Word documents. He would launch Word, type the words "Staff meeting at 2 p.m.," save the document in Word format, and then attach it in an email to everyone. What a retard! Everyone suffered. We would have to extract the attachment, scan it for viruses, and then open it up in Word -- which was also quite difficult whenever we were viewing his email on a computer where Word was not installed! Really, in this case, the important thing was the message content, not the margins, fonts, or page size. So why encapsulate the message in a Word document when no one cares about all that stuff? Just paste your message into the main email body, please.
To be continued (and perhaps proofread)...
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