Open Trackbacks - Email Forward Rant Edition
July 7, 2006 by Laura | Trackback URI
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Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger
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Because I have so many email accounts (admin accounts for client websites, plus two personal accounts) I get a lot of email. Cloudmark takes care of about 98% of the spam, but that doesn’t help the email forward kind of spam. You know the ones. Emails that a three minute visit to Snopes or About Urban Legends or an ounce of critical thinking would stop in their tracks.
To all serial forwarders:
I promise you, the only thing that will happen when you forward that email to ten people is that the amount of spam your ten friends receive will increase. Your computer will not do any amazing tricks and no one will send you a check. Politicians don’t care about email petitions. They care what registered voters in their district think, and not much, at that. If you absolutely *must* forward something to a group, for pity’s sake use BCC, not To so that the addresses will be hidden. Use your email program’s Find and Replace tool to find “>” and replace it with nothing to quickly strip out thousands of brackets. If your email program doesn’t have Find and Replace, then copy the body of the email into Wordpad - every Windows computer has this - and do it there. Start > All Programs > Accessories > Wordpad. Paste whatever you want to forward into a new email so that all the email addresses of the people who received it before you are not sent on to hundreds or thousands of strangers.
Occasionally, I do get a forward that is chock full of helpful information. Here’s today’s example: 
AMAZINGLY SIMPLE HOME REMEDIES:
- If you are choking on an ice cube, don’t panic. Simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat and presto! The blockage will be almost instantly removed.
- Clumsy? Avoid cutting yourself while slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold them while you chop away.
- Avoid arguments with the Mrs. about lifting the toilet seat by simply using the sink.
- For high blood pressure sufferers: simply cut yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing the pressure in your veins. Remember to use a timer.
- If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of laxatives, then you will be afraid to cough.
- Have a bad toothache? Smash your thumb with a hammer and you will forget all about the toothache.
- A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
1. Planck’s Constant on 05 Jul 2006 at 8:05 pm
Korea: what rockets do when you peddle fake vxxxxx
Now if only Kim Jong Il whose underpants are emblazoned with the phrase “Home of the Whopper,” would stop peddling fake Vxxxxx maybe his rockets would stay up longer, or at least fours hours according to the warning label. Wait, what am I saying?
2. Conservative Cat on 06 Jul 2006 at 7:31 pm
The Werewolf of Mosquito Woods
Bruce has finally finished his fourth short story about the world of the Bronze Empire: The Werewolf of Mosquito Woods Like The Dragon of Upways Gorge, this one is also set in the Enchanted Mountains, but it’s less political. Of…
I sometimes blog about them and send them back to whoever emailed me. But getting the truth out about these spam rumors is like trying to get the truth out of the New York Times. I’m linking you to a house fire email rumor I got a few months back: Glade Plug-Ins and House Fires
Two good things about forward spam: 1) blog fodder and 2) helps identify the gullible in our lives, so we know who to avoid. Or maybe, who to borrow money from?