Simple Steps To Avoid “Spam” And Reduce Internet Clutter

[tag]internet manners, spam, blind copy, forwarding, glurge[/tag]

The Internet has been around for 34 years now, in its most basic form. Originally developed in the ’60’s by a government agency to facilitate communication in the event of nuclear attack, it hit its stride with the development of TCP/IP by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974.

Despite the Net having reached the 1/3 Century mark, there are still folks who don’t know the rudiments of Internet safety or manners. This is partly a function of the exponential expansion of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the proliferation of computers and computer users, but it is also due — in unnecessarily large part — to the ignorance of some of those users. Since those are also the ones who are most likely to mindlessly forward their worms, trojans, viruses and other malware to their friends, and send all those friends’ Email addresses along to whoever wants to collect and use them, they contribute to a great many of the problems currently extant on the Net.

My friend Patricia wrote an excellent piece on “glurge,” the crap that floats through the sewers of the Web and eventually ends up splattered all over your Inbox. She tells me that she got a lot of “hate mail” from all the folks who didn’t want to believe that their efforts weren’t helping poor little Orphant Annie recover from her cancer and the loss of her little brother to child thieves who hang out in the mall restrooms. Well, I’m neither as polite as Patricia, nor as ladylike, so I’m posting this for her to forward to all the nitwits who have nothing better to do than insult their intellectual superiors.

Herewith: a primer on Internet and Web manners, with a focus on our responsibilities to each other when it comes to their most egregiously violated area: Email.

1. Never simply forward e-mail. Always…

– Select the text you want to share before you click on “Forward.” This should eliminate all those addresses that others probably don’t want spread all over the Net. If it doesn’t, select the addresses and delete them from the copy you will forward.

– “BCC” (Blind Carbon Copy) the addresses you forward the message to. Check your e-mail program’s “Help” file if you don’t know how to do this. It’s just as easy as any other way. When you BCC, each person receives their own address, but not those of the other 74 close friends you mailed it to. Why do this? It’s respectful of your correspondents, that’s why. If you don’t, anyone who is interested can “mine” all your friends’ e-mail addresses from the header. (They’re there, whether you can see them or not.) Don’t give your friends’ addresses to people who have no business having them.

– Mailing list collectors start mailings so that they can collect addresses when the thing comes back to them. They love petitions, and those sappy things about the missing kids with incurable diseases who desperately need their medications. Did you ever get a so-called “petition” that asks you to send the list back to a particular address every 150 names or so? Did you ever actually do it? Suckerrrrr!

Looking out for your friends’ interest takes about 10 seconds. If the message isn’t worth that much effort, it probably isn’t worth forwarding anyway — and if your friends aren’t worth that much effort, you’re kidding yourself about who your friends are.

– Another reason: Some people (like me) delete such things without reading them, regardless of who sent them.

2. You can assume that just about any request via Email is bogus, unless it has an official web site for you to check. The vast majority of the stuff forwarded on the Web is b.s. The pleas to find lost children, the offers of free certificates to people who forward messages are BOGUS! Before forwarding, check it out at Snopes.Com to find out if it’s the real thing. If you don’t — well, can you say, “Bad Internet Manners?”

3. No one really wants to see the collection of poorly-photographed kittens and puppies. Delete it. You’re wasting your ISP’s bandwidth, and eventually they’ll start charging everyone more as a result.

4. There is no such thing as a program that can track e-mail messages. Micro$oft isn’t going to send you money for forwarding e-mail. They’ve got thousands of computers and employees, you dip; why should they pay you? Use a little common sense, for heaven’s sake!

5. There is no way to tell from an e-mail how old it is, and therefore you can’t even tell if it’s current information. Most of the “lost child” hoaxes have been floating around for years. Browse Snopes.Com. You’ll be amazed at all the stuff you may have taken for granted that’s just fertilizer.

6. Internet petitions are useless. U-S-E-L-E-S-S! Don’t forward them because someone writes, “This may do some good.” It will not do any good. Any petition that doesn’t authenticate the name and address of every single person who signs is useless. There is nothing to stop me from sitting down and producing a petition — with the help of your improperly forwarded e-mails — that has your friends’ and your names on it. Politicians and business people know that, and give such things exactly the attention they merit.

[Caveat: There is the possibility that the petitions of some organizations who record your data and support their petitions with that information may do some good. The jury's still out, but if you haven't registered with the site that's sending the petition, forget it.]

Internet petitions are feel-good, cheap strokes for the senders’ egos. They give the illusion of having accomplished something worthwhile, without costing any effort. Instead of taking up other people’s time with such junk, why don’t you volunteer for a good cause and actually accomplish something? Could change your whole life. Oh. You’re too busy. That’s why you spend hours Web-surfing. I get it.

7. Mass forwarding, in addition to providing spammers with useful addresses, is one of the main reasons for server overloads and slow Internet operation. The reason every ISP in the business will boot you if they find you doing unauthorized mass mailings is that it costs them…and, ultimately, you and I…money. Think carefully about how important it is to forward that priceless piece of…whatever. Repeat after me: “Bad Internet Manners!”

8. If you want me to trash your message without reading it, put “this is funny” in the header. Let me decide for myself. What are you…some kind of humor judge? If you think I need to be told it’s funny, it probably isn’t funny enough to bother with.

While you’re at it, why not learn to put something useful in the subject line, so that your correspondents will have an idea what it’s about and so that they’ll be able to reference it and find it later (in the highly unlikely event that it’s worth reading again).

9. A sure way to annoy people is to imply, by some little ditty at the bottom, that they’re not a nice person if they don’t do the right thing with the stupid mailing. It’s so cheap! I create special filters for people who send me stuff like that.

10. Check with your correspondents to find out if they want you to send them this stuff. “Oh, it’s OK if you really think it’s important,” means “NO!”

11. If you don’t pay any attention at all to the other stuff, at least try to go with 1 and 2.

I don’t mean to be rude, but — well, actually, I do mean to be rude. This kind of mindless b.s. fills my inbox every day, and annoys me no end. If you don’t agree that this adds up to simple good manners, feel free to ignore it. Your correspondents will loathe you for it, but it’s your choice. Just take me off your list, OK?