I don’t mind getting emails that are passed around from one person to another. I’m not a particular fan of what I like to call ‘life lists’–emails with lists of wisdoms and suggestions about how to live your life–but I understand that they strike with people and they just want to help others out and make people feel good. I’m down with that. I also don’t mind funny emails, who doesn’t like a good chuckle. What I do mind is email poorly formatted. It makes me to not want read it. When I forward an email, I want my recipients to read it. I do a few thing to clean up their presentation:
- Strip out any request or coercion to send the email to other people. I intend to send something humorous or pithy, not a chain letter. Nothing bad has ever happened to me because I did this.
- Strip out any reference to forwarding or sending to others such as carats or bars in the left
- Remove any signatures that have been attached but never removed. I’ll leave mine so that my recipients are more assured that the email is from me.
- Remove extra lines.
- Remove any other superfluous comments or content from other that are unrelated to the email and were added along the way by others who wanted to be funny, cleaver or poignant.
- As well, remove any political, religious or overly vulgar content. If the context of the email is political, religious or vulgar in nature, I ensure my recipients are open to receiving these types of emails.
- Edit the email for content and remove anything that does not flow with the content.
- Lastly, I put everyone’s email address in the bcc fiend and send the email to myself. This prevents everyone’s email address from being divulged.
The downside to the last point is that because all the recipients are hidden from each other, none of them know who also received my email. The recipients may foward it inadvertently to people whom have already received it giving them multiple copies. I rest easy, though, knowing that my version probably looked the best.