We’ve all received them… “fwd” emails. Some are great and helpful. Many are – well… not; they’re jokes, or junk.
If you plan on sending a message by using the “fwd” function, take a few minutes to clean it up and make it worthwhile to the recipient. Start by taking all but one “fwd” out of the subject line. Many email programs automatically do this for you, but it’s a good habit to check your subject line anyway. Not too many people actually open and read the message that begins “Fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: This one is REALLY funny!” Next, clean up the content of the email. Remove all of the previous email addresses and user information from the body of the text so that the message contains only the information you wish to forward.
Once you’ve cleaned it up a bit, add a personal note at the beginning:
Something along the lines of, “Suzanne, I thought this one would be of interest to you. Enjoy!”
If you’re sending it to more than one person, address it to yourself and use the BCC function to help alleviate the possibility of your friends email addresses being sent along with the next forward.
If you are forwarding something that is “too good to be true”, then it probably is. There is a great resource to check the authenticity of emails floating around. It is www.snopes.com. Check out the email first to verify it’s content before sending it on.
And last but not least, the fwd-ing of chain letters such as “send this to 10 people within the next 5 minutes and something REALLY great will happen”, don’t work. Save yourself the 5 minutes of anxiety (waiting for that said “great” thing to happen) and hit delete.
