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.
That was a classic Chris. And you are so right!
Thanks, Sherry! I hope folks take a minute (Or a minute and eighteen seconds, to be precise) and listen to the little message.
Feel free to pass it on!
Well said! Sad I have to seek out strangers who actually understand where I’m coming from in regards to chain email. Most of my relatives on the net and some friends send practically nothing but junk and when I caution them to kick the chain email forwarding habit, they stop emailing me and go on to forwarding chain email to other people! Argh!
I’ve resorted to making a soundoff page where I put all my screaming fits whenever I get one of those things. I also have a list that’s meant for fun, chatting and sharing – anything but fwds, with one exception – if someone has received a chain and wants to mst the heck out of it and express why it’s driving them crazy.
I’m putting a link to your site on my soundoff page as well as my other wikis and the FWF list. Really like the recording – this is the first time I’ve come across an audio version of the particular motivational about why not to send forwards.
I don’t fit in on the snopes boards too well either, because there are a lot of anti-Christian twits. And I don’t mean simply that they are not Christian. I mean, they bash Christianity along with the idiotic religious fwds that are out there, and that makes me mad. I also can’t stand it when I see other Christians passing on that junk
Oops, gotta run.
Capri
Hey, Capri. I totally feel your pain.
Of course you could help edumacate your friends and family by going to the audio file here: Stop Forwarding Those Emails! Then click on the “Send to a Friend” link and email it to your friends.
Of course that kinda defeats the purpose of the drill, I suppose.
You are HILARIOUS! Love this post. I even shared it with my mom, and we listened together. You should take this MP3 and post it somewhere to go viral. It’s AWESOME!
Now go share this comment with 10 of your friends or you will…wait, you mentioned I’m going to be constipated. I gotta go…REALLY BAD!
Happy Friday buddy!
Phil, glad to make you (and your mom) smile today.
And I’m open to ideas on where to post it if you’ve got any.
Mega Dittos from the Queen email filterer.
I have another one for your list. Reputation. I have a couple of folks who routinely send me lots of junk email. It has happened more than once that I have deleted an actual email from them because I just assumed it was more junk. While the error of assumption is wrong on my part (and I try not to do it) the creation of perception is all theirs.
Totally agree with you: The forward button should never have been invented! It makes already-lazy people lazier!
People who put all the emails into the TO field, not the BCC field should be shown what it does to a MAIL-server. Business’s must spend billions each year deforesting their servers of dead-emails!
The worst emails I receive are from people who still think that luck and good fortune will happen if they forward to 10 friends a sad story about a poorly child!
April, I’ve had that same problem deleting legitimate emails from some folks. It’s just like the boy who cried wolf, eh?
Stephen, That’s a great phrase, “deforesting their servers of dead emails”. Makes those chronic forwarders seem environmentally un-friendly!
Chris, I was trying to think of another word – but ‘deforestation’ appeared first – and it seemed much more apt!
Since the WWW is our ‘front and backyard’, yes, very unfriendly is so true.
I’ve had to resort to the bane of blogging… approving every comment before it goes live.
That was great, Chris. I’m thankful I don’t get many forwarded emails. Of course, they may mean I don’t have any friends to begin with.
Rick, You’ve got lots of friends. They are just bloggy types, not email types.
Required reading for all friends. Thanks Chris.
Thanks, Dawud!
ROTFL! ROTFL! Yaaaaaaaaaaay Chris!
Glad I could make you smile, Laura.
Great advice.I have dugg this post so that addicted email forwarders can learn one lesson or two.
Well spoken!
When I get such forwarded email sometimes I can’t believe that people waste time on such stories. I always answer, that this is not true and this mail is marked as a hoax and show them link to hoax description. Now I don’t get such emails and I hope these people stopped doing that. Usually it is about viruses and somebody being seriously ill.
Alex
Have had trouble with spam, particularly on the social networking sites. There is no end to how gullible people can be when it comes to forwarding spam, people don’t hesitate to send out spam even if the ‘spam factor’ is so very obvious. I just don’t seem to get their point with this.
My response was, i made a blog post about my views regarding spam, and i posted a link to each and every single friend who sent me the spam, the post was pretty strongly worded, and i must say it pretty much worked fine, a few of my friends came up and thanked me for explaining the nuances behind spam, and they’ve passed on the message too. So i can revel in the fact that i personally made at least a couple of them drop spamming ..
Well, I’m back again at long last. Took down the first Sounding Off site but have your link to this post up on another site. People have been saying how email forwards are getting less – but that doesn’t mean fwd chains are decreasing. It just means those dang things have migrated to social networks. *cough* Facebook Super Wall/Fun Space Not at all super or fun, and the sad thing is, they would be super fun if people didn’t use them to send around all that viral crap. Most Facebook “fun” applications are nothing but chain letters as well, because it seems everybody gets into the same thing all at once. “Farm Town” And I think it was Petrol Head last year. Don’t get me started on the “Send virtual junk” apps, ugh! Anyway, the link to this post of yours and the mp3 is somewhere down the page of the “Various Reactions” section of the chain letters Pbworks site. A friend and I started a section on a fiction writing site where we took a couple of chain letters that originally consisted of incomplete stories that trailed off in a mysterious way. These forwards say that in order to get more of the story, you have to send them to x number of people, what rubbish. So, we took the two stories, melded them together into one, and wrote their complesion. So if I ever get an incomplete story forward, if it’s one of those two, I’ll just tell the sender to check out that site and get the whole story, and not to bother forwarding it anywhere else. If I get another incomplete story forward, I’ll have fun writing the ending and foiling that chain as well.