Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
My mom and grandma used to send me these. I sat them down and said:
"Look, I don't care how much you send me, I don't care what it is, but if I do have one rule about email that comes to me if it is forwarded to you, you must not forward it to me. You must take the entire contents of the email, remove any arrows ( >>>> ) from the beginning of each line and the addresses of the 72 people who forwarded it to you. You may then send me whatever is left. If you cannot do this, then I will put your email into my spam box and that means I will never get any important email from you. This is your choice."
Now that is a lot to ask of someone who is used to just hitting 2 buttons to send this hideous (and quite useless) email to their entire contact list. Now my mother only sends me things that are worth her time to clean up. My grandmother, bless her soul, ended up in the spam box, so I only need to talk to her when my Grandpa opens an attachment on his email or deletes his entire inbox of get rich scams he bought off the internet.
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I started getting mail from people I never knew, with all the >>>>> and all the e-mail addresses visible too. I looked at the addresses that were visible and determined that we had mutual friends but did not know one another. So they were just sending out mass mailings to all contacts, including the ones already on the forwarded list.
First of all, I sent the mail back to people I never knew and told them that although we obviously had mutual friends, we did not know one another and as such, I did not want mail from them and I told them to clean up their contacts list and remove me as a contact.
Then I sent all my contacts a tutorial.
First of all, I told them of the tip above that you mentioned above. I also told them how to clean up the subject line by removing " Fw: "
Then I told them, that I refuse to open up an attachment that leads to yet another attachment that leads to yet another attachment..... That if they wished to send me that final attachment, they have to forward at the last stage, not the first stage.
Then I told them that they should bcc, not use to: That way, the names and addresses of the intended recipients are hidden.
And I told them that prior to sending me yet another warning, they better check it out on snopes and gave them the web address for that site as well.
And I told them, that while I love them all dearly, I am sorry, but I have never kept up the chain letters that they have sent me, and in fact, most have not even been looked at. And I kind of warned them, that if they want to keep internet free in the future, then they should be careful about how much spam they themselves initiate and circulate. Bandwidth is an issue that will escalate if rubbish just keeps circulating.
It has been a month, at least I no longer get mailings from friends of friends.