Everyone knows them. The so-called ‘funny’ mails.
Most of the time they contain a hoax, a big-ass picture, a power-point presentation or a video clip.
On top of this, they usually also contain a huge list of mail-addresses from people you don’t even know.
By this post, I’d like to point out that not all people like these mails unlike what some people tend to think.
Consider that there are people that get a lot of serious mail. (yes, it can be used in such manner)
You might not be aware of it, but reading all those mails take an huge amount of time.
These people are constantly fighting against unwanted messages as it consumes way too much time.
This is not such a big deal, but it gets harder if their mail-address is being used in a inappropriate way.
By inappropriate I mean that their mail-address, along with a lot of other addresses, is put inside the ‘cc:’ field, making it visible to all people ever receiving that mail.
If you’re not aware of the implications, just imagine that your home address or your cell-number is published instead of your mail address.
Some people use this medium for work related communications or for serious business. The so funny mails become quite annoying in this context.
In the end, they are unwanted messages, also called spam.
I understand that you might want to share the funny stuff with people you know.
But take some actions to prevent spamming people.
Things you can do
- Use the BCC: field to place the mail-addresses in.
This will prevent you from distributing people’s address to the world.
You can do this in Outlook . - Think twice when forwarding a mail to your contacts.
Differentiate people that use the mail-system for social contacts and those that use it for serious business.
You can do this by making distribution listsin Outlook or Windows Live (alias hotmail), categorizing these people.
This makes it also faster and easier to send the mails. - If someone answers your mail asking you to stop sending this kind of mails, don’t ignore it.
That person will possibly just block all your mails, resulting in the ignorance of serious mails.
For an overview of the email etiquette you can check out this website for a nice and comprehensive list of things you should know before using any mail-system.