Lake Neuron

Five reasons not to forward

Please, please, please don’t automatically forward e-mails you receive to everyone in your address book — not even if the e-mail asks you to. (Especially if the e-mail asks you to.) There’s nothing wrong with forwarding something you like to someone specific whom you think might enjoy it, but passing things along to everyone you know is a bad idea. Here’s why.

1) It’s probably wrong.
The vast majority of pass-along virus warnings, political diatribes, other dire warnings and what have you are either completely false, out of date, or contain some sort of distortion, exaggeration or factual error. At the very minimum, check things out at www.snopes.com before passing them along. The Snopes site does a great job of tracking down the truth behind commonly-circulated e-mails. Just type in a few key words from the pass-along message into Snopes’ search engine and see what you can find out.

Sometimes, the pass-alongs that are out-of-date or partly true can do more damage than the out-and-out false ones, because there’s just enough legitimacy to them that people take them seriously.

In a few cases, I’ve told some people that they were passing along bad information, and had them respond that they don’t care! They apparently feel that if there’s even a chance that the thing they’re warning about might become a threat some day, that justifies them passing along an e-mail which states that it’s already a threat. They could not be more wrong. Responding based on bad information only makes the writers look silly, and takes away credibility they might need in the future when and if there really is a threat. Ever hear about the boy who cried “wolf”?

2) It’s a matter of taste.
Not everyone shares your sense of humor. Not everyone shares your political viewpoint, or your exact theology, or your idea of what’s adorable. A story that you think is touching, someone else may think is sappy. A political message that you think is of vital importance may come across as heavy-handed and divisive when read by someone of another party — and you may surprised to find that not all of your friends or family members share your beliefs.

You’re certainly entitled to try to persuade your friends and family members on important issues of faith or politics. That’s part of your right and responsibility as a free citizen. But that is best done with personal communication, not pass-alongs. I suspect that most people who pass along persuasive messages do so because they make the blanket (and flawed) assumption that the recipients already agree with them. Most diatribe pass-alongs are written as if “preaching to the choir.”

3) It’s a privacy issue.
Most people who send pass-alongs put all of their friends’ addresses in the “to:” line of the e-mail, meaning that anyone who receives the message has access to all of those addresses. Depending on how the messages are forwarded and formatted, all of the addresses from several generations of forward may be visible. Not all of the people in your address book may want their e-mail addresses shared in this fashion, especially if the message eventually finds its way into the hands of a spammer or someone else with malicious intent.

If you do have to send something to a large group of people, put most of the e-mail addresses into the blind carbon copy ( “bcc” ) line instead of the “to” line. This will prevent the recipients from seeing each other’s addresses. You still need to put at least one address onto the “to” line, but this can be an alternate address of your own or the address of someone you know doesn’t mind having their e-mail address shared.

If you don’t know how to send a bcc, consult the help feature of your e-mail software or webmail service.

4) It’s often redundant.
If one of your friends has a lot of online contacts, he or she may receive the same pass-along message, over and over again from different directions. That gets annoying really quickly.

5) We’d rather hear from you personally.
In many cases, the worst offenders for pass-along e-mails are people who never actually write their own e-mail messages. Your friends and family members would much rather receive a two-sentence note that’s actually from and about you than some lame old joke or stupid “inspirational” story. It doesn’t have to be long, or stylish, or correctly spelled, or gramatically flawless, as long as it’s personal.

Please, please, please. Just don’t do it.

(c) 2008 by John I. Carney. Original version posted Sept. 4, 2008; last revision Sept. 14, 2008. Permission to reprint brief excerpts is granted but a link back here would be appreciated.