Forwarding Emails – The Right Way

Posted on: October 20th, 2008

I recently have been getting forwarded emails. Probably you get these kind of emails also. There are some common mistakes that almost every single one of the forwarded emails contained. That prompted me to write this article on how to do it right.

There’s an excellent article that lists five points of etiquette when forwarding emails. Because of copyright reasons I can’t include that article here, or quote from it but here’s the link to it:

http://www.netmanners.com/email-etiquette/5-rules-of-forwarding-email/

I highly recommend that everyone who does forwarding to others either occasionally, or frequently, to read this article thoroughly. If you abide by these rules then it will be much appreciated by the recipients of your forwarded emails.

One thing I’d like to reemphasize from this article is the rule #1: remove all other people’s email addresses from the message before sending it on. Why is it so important? Because if you send an email containing a hundred email addresses to someone with spyware on his/her computer then that spyware will intercept this email, extract all the email addresses and send them to be included in some spammer’s list. So you possibly do a disservice to those people if you don’t remove their email addresses from the forwarded message.

The same reasoning is behind rule #5: use BCC: field for multiple recipients, not the TO: or CC: fields. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. If you list recipients in that field then they will receive it just as if you used TO: or CC: but they will not see any other people’s email address who was also listed in the BCC: field.

To have a better idea on this I include here a couple of screen shots on how to use BCC: on different email programs:

Outlook 2003:

Tunderbird:

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