Forward But In The Right Spirit

I had been thinking of writing on rules for forwarding mails for sometime but had not done so. I recently got a mail that spoke about email rules. This reminded me to write on the art of forwarding mails. I know that a lot of people do not want to receive such mails and especially the ones that want you to forward them to more people. This adds to work. To forward a mail one must try to make the mail as concise as possible so that the receiver’s inbox is not clogged. One can zip large attachments in a mail before forwarding it. I find it best to forward the main content of the mail from the forwarded mail and not just forward what I have received. This makes me bring down the size of say a 4 MB mail to as less as 0.25 MB. Names of all the people who have forwarded and received the previous mails is not required by those whom we want to forward the mail to. Nobody likes reading names of people whom they do not know. Caution and judgement are required in forwarding mails as to the age of the audience. There are times when mails have adult content that might need censoring if the mail is meant for a larger audience of mixed ages and tastes. Forwarding mails blindly is like acting as a post office. One thing that I would be implementing in my mails is to write the email ids under Bcc and not under To. This will help in non disclosure of personal email ids to others who will get the forwarded mails at a later date and it will also keep the mail content clean and crisp for my mail recipients. One must check with the mail recipients in advance if they like receiving global mails. I know I have not done this as I assumed that my friends and relatives would like the mails. I should have ideally checked with them so that I do not offend anyone. Greetings and language of the mail should be proper and polite. Non official mails should not read like official circulars or memos. Adding a personal touch to personal mails would be surely appreciated by the readers. Giving credit to the mail originator or the person who sent you the mail is also a good gesture. Another point needs to be noted while replying to a forwarded mail that had attachments. It is good to thank the person who sent you a nice mail but this should be done by deleting the attachments from the original mail so that the sender gets a 1kb mail instead of a 2 MB or 4 MB mail. Imagine having sent a big mail to 5 people and all 5 replying with attachments. In most likelihood four of these replies will bounce or get lost in the server. A separate thank you mail can also be sent to avoid replying with attachments. I can think of these main points as of now that I have noted in the forwarded mails that come to me. I will add to these rules later in case I notice something worth sharing.