Warding Off Forwarded Emails

Is there a nice way of doing this to your email contacts?

As the world today becomes increasingly dependent on technology, one of the pitfalls is the inevitable abuse of such mechanisms. A few months or years ago, this took the form of SMS. At the time, it was a free service. People kept forwarding useless messages to other mobile phone subscribers...and so now we paid the price when telcos decided each SMS should be charged accordingly. That step drastically curbed keypad-happy texters to become more prudent in their SMS activities, but of course, certain promos such as "unlitxt" still satisfies their compulsive texting needs.

And now the most logical alternative to SMS-ing would be emailing. It's free, and it's now very accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harry. Or Jane, Mary and Sally.

Don't you hate it when people send you messages with this subject: "Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Chain letter...don't break it unless you want to die!!!!!!!" How utterly childish and nonsensical! I may sound like an old prude but I really hate it.

Come on, do we seriously believe that committing a "sin of omission" (such as deliberately not forwarding chain letters) would really be enough cause for us to keel over and die? I may be a non-practising Christian, but, hey, I have a high opinion of God. He's not gonna strike me dead just because I refuse to forward a useless message, which, for all I know, contains a Trojan virus or a worm that could do some effing damage to my friends' motherboards or files.

I will not play hypocrite and say that I've never done this before. Like I said, it's a pitfall. I did that in the past, but I guess I matured and thought that I might possibly be pissing off my email contacts!

From time to time, I have to be honest that I forward email messages on occasion. But that's when I really think the contents are worth sharing. Otherwise, I don't even bother reading them. I've actually identified a few of my email contacts as "spammers" and automatically delete their forwarded messages.

And FYI, sending forwarded messages doesn't exactly fall under "keeping in touch". If you ask me, I would rather receive a short "hi, just dropping by to say good morning" or something like that, rather than get slews of crappy "Fwd: fwd: fwd".

So there. If you're really my friend, please, you MUST know me better. Don't wait for me to tell it to you straight, and then run back crying for your mommy when your feelings are hurt. Choose the things you share.

Or better yet, GROW UP.