It seems to me that more and more email I receive is arriving with so many spam causing issues that my TIP that I have created many moons ago and placed in my TIPS page needs to be brought back to life here in the blog.
How many times do you receive email with addresses from many other people as well. You know, the joke or chain letter that wants you to forward to all your friends. Or, maybe you have a very important message that you want to send to many people and you would like to do it all in one email. In any case the following information is for you!
Using Outlook Express to explain it, this will work with Outlook or Netscape mail, as well as most other email programs on the market. When you receive a message, lets say a joke, and you want to forward it on this is what you should do.
press forward button which will automatically compose a new message with the contents of the original message as well as a fw: in the subject line and it waits for you to address it.
press the address book button on the TO: in the composition window which will open your address book with your list of contacts.
now create a new email contact by clicking new.
put the name Undisclosed Recipient in for the name and use YOUR email address. Yes, this is the email address you want others to send you mail to.
now place this new contact in the TO box by clicking on the --> arrow or by double clicking on that name from the list.
now for everyone else that you want a copy of the letter to go to, use BCC which is short for BLIND CARBON COPY. What this does is send a copy to the person you have in the BCC list but doesn't show everyone else.
Before you send it, take a look at the contents of the message.. you will notice all the other email addresses from previous deliveries. You can now start at the beginning of the "junk" in the mail and drag your mouse down to the beginning of the REAL MESSAGE. Now that all the junk is highlighted, press DEL on your keyboard. Note the bottom of the email as well, as there is quite often advertising or footers noting ISP information or "get your hotmail now" type of junk that can be removed. Basically you want to send the CONTENT of the email, not all the other stuff.
Now because you have addressed it to Undisclosed Recipient (yourself) and everyone else is in the BCC list then the message will come back to you after you send it. This works good if you want confirmation that your email is going out and is actually being received by someone.
When the recipient gets the message and, lets say it was a great joke, and they too forward it to someone, at least when they do it, (and I am sure they will probably not do it the correct way unless you have already passed this tip on to them), you have removed all other names from the list. up until you got it. Hopefully the more people that read this tip will also start doing this and eventually we will have clean mail.
Oh, on the note of "clean mail".. if you want to really make life simple for yourself and others and don't like having to do this manually (cleaning the mail that is).. why not get the free "email cleaner" program which works great for removing all those ">" in email that has been forwarded over and over again. Check out my SOFTWARE/SUPPORT area for links to downloading this and other useful software.
