Don’t Forward My Email Address!

Everybody does it. You get a funny joke or an inspirational message and you want to pass it on to your friends and family. So you put a dozen names in the “to” field of a new email and you hit send. But there is a serious problem with doing that—you are putting your friends and family at risk of receiving spam and other unsolicited messages. Also, I believe that you are violating someone’s privacy when you show their email address to others without their permission.

Think about all the emails you receive from your friends. There are often about five different sets of forwards in the email before you actually get to the joke. Now you probably couldn’t care less about these names. But think about it. Your name is on that list. Do you want your email address given out to tens of dozens of people you don’t know?

Just recently, I received an email from a woman who’s name I didn’t recognize. She turned out to be a friend of a friend. Someone I had had dinner with once. My friend had sent out a blanket email once to gather people for a brunch, and this woman had kept all of her friend’s friends’ email addresses. That really bugged me, because I hadn't given her my email address myself.

Here are some rules of email etiquette I believe we all should follow:

1. Only group together the email addresses of friends and family who already have those other email addresses. Otherwise, send out emails to your friends and family individually without other people’s addresses in it.

2. When you receive a joke or another type of message you feel is worthy of passing on, after you hit the forward button, go down into the body of the message and delete the names of the previous recipients. Keep deleting until the actual content of the email comes up in the window.

Remember, if you’re forwarding messages with other people’s email addresses on them, then other people are forwarding messages with your email address on it. Start respecting other people’s privacy today and teach others to do the same. Not only is it good etiquette, but it’s less fodder out there for spammers to get ahold of.

Please check out my novel, In Fashion's Web on Amazon.