Rick's 3 Rules of Email

1. Never Forward Email
2. Never Forward Email
3. IF you must forward email, ALWAYS use Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) and ALWAYS clean up the header information from previous email.

Some computer users who encounter my rules of email sometimes pass off my thoughts as being too strict. Unfortunately, I know it isn't true. Today, for the upteenth time, I worked with a customer who has had her email address for less than a year and already is inundated with more than 75 spam per day. Luckily her Internet provider has a decent spam filter, but she still has to put up with a lot of unwanted spam. The only thing she uses the email address for is correspondence with some family, friends, and two religious oriented weekly email newsletters.

After talking with her and looking through her inbox, it was clear that the four or five serial forwarders on her list led to her email demise. None of the forwarders in here inbox used BCC and none of them cleaned up the header information (previous list of email recipients) from the email. I know the serial forwarders mean no harm, but in the long run, they are the root cause of spam.

Why? Serial forwarding is a disease that unfortunately afflicts too many computer users. If one serial forwarder sends a message to thirty people in their address book without BCCing the addresses, all those emails are exposed. Of those thirty recipients, maybe one or two (or more) will forward the message to their entire address book....without cleaning up the previous addresses and again not using the BCC. By the time this scenario happens a few times, the original email addresses have landed in literally 100's of inboxes around the world. At some point, an enterprising person culls all the email addresses and sells them to a spammer...and the onlslaught begins.

Please be courteous and never forward email...and if you must, use the BCC and clean up the previous headers. Only YOU can prevent spam. 

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