Etiquette for forwarding emails (funny or not)

I originally posted this on May 20, 2003, so I am not going to post it again.

A friend of mine forwarded this to me the other day. The really funny part is that it was flagged as spam, POPFILE was 99% sure of it. I am not going to correct it either. The email had an attachment, that just had a transcript of who had forwarded the email to who (I know who you are).

Of the classified words recognized by POPFILE, there are an overwhelming number of "red" words compared to "green" words.

Oddly, most forwards do get through my spam filter. If I hadn't looked in my "Deleted Items" folder and noticed that there was a message flagged as spam by someone in my address book, I would have never seen this funny joke.

So here is a piece of advice about sending forwards, some are specific, some is general.

1. Put all the email addresses in the BCC field. Put your email address in the TO field. Send.

2. Delete the attachment that is the history transcript. Do not send attachments. Images are generally acceptable as attachments, as they sometimes help the funny.

3. Take the time to delete all the forwarding >>> arrow marks. Also take out all the extra space above or below the message. No one likes to scroll for miles, and then have to read the message with a bunch of >>> marks everywhere.

4. Send as plain text. Not all email clients can handle HTML email. Not all people like HTML email. Not all webmail clients like HTML email (ironic, I know).

5. You may want to include some text, a paragraph or so, written by you. This would offset the spam likelihood regardless of the message content (say your funny joke was about a virus, or maybe you are sending a joke about Viagra)

Article Author: Ken Edwards

Ken Edwards is the Gaming Editor at Blogcritics, and calls Breaking Windows home. Ken works part time for Student Publications at BGSU as the Webmaster and System Administrator. He is also a freelance web developer.

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