Net Etiquette 5: Fwd: >>Forwarding e-mails

My final post (for now) on internet etiquette – which (you will remember from the first one) is about helping those who wish to be courteous online to avoid unwitting discourtesy.

Time to talk about forwarding e-mails / attachments on to other people.

1. Virus alerts / security warnings / and other such well-intentioned things. There are always a number of these flying around the internet. Let me give you a recent example (source: F-Secure Hoax Information)

“All mobile users pay attention!!!!!!!!!

“If you receive a phone call and your mobile phone displays (XALAN) on the screen don’t answer the call, END THE CALL IMMEDIATELY, if you answer the call,your phone will be infected by a virus. This virus WILL ERASE all IMEI and IMSI information from both your phone and your SIM card, which will make your phone unable to connect with the telephone network. You will have to buy a new phone. This information has been confirmed by both Motorola and Nokia. There are over 3 Million mobile phones being infected by this virus in all around the world now. You can also check this news in the CNN web site.

“PLEASE FORWARD THIS PIECE OF INFORMATION TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS HAVING A MOBILE PHONE”

One of the tell-tale signs that this is a hoax is the request to forward it to all your friends! But the other thing you can do is to search for a phrase from it on any of the search engines and you’ll find it if it’s a hoax. (If you surround what you search for in quotation marks, you can search for that exact phrase rather than just for all of the words you give). For example search on google for this virus WILL ERASE all IMEI and IMSI information and you will see instantly that it is a hoax.

The irony is that these virus warnings are actually the virus. People’s time and computer resources are used… forwarding the warning. That is the payload!

2. Large attachments. Before forwarding / sending a large attachment, it is polite to consider how necessary it is. I love getting photos of people’s weddings / new babies / etc., but I don’t need them at 10 mega-pixels. That makes for a 4MB file, 3 of which is a 12MB e-mail. That’s fine for me, I’m on broadband and it takes about 2 minutes to download an e-mail like that. Pity that person still on dial-up, for whom 1MB of download is about 4 minutes – nearly an hour later, and 60p in call charges, they can retrieve the e-mail after it in the queue.

Word documents / PDF files can also be quite large. They are harder to deal with, so it’s more a matter of deciding whether it needs forwarding “as is”. I was recently sent an 18MB e-mail that was nothing more than some official word document advertising an initiative in the diocese. There are tricks within Word, if you can be bothered, that allow you to reduce embedded photos so that they are only the size they need to be in order to print correctly.

3. Jokes / amusing powerpoint shows / etc. can be fun to deal with. Or they can be time and inbox cloggers. Some people automatically forward all of the ones they recieve onto their whole address book. It is probably more courteous to save forwarding for the better jokes to your better friends. But you know your friends better than I do.

That’s my “week of etiquette online” done. I feel a lot better now! I hope that was helpful for someone!

Next week: Back to covenantal objectivity.