E-mail etiquette: The bigger the message the more time and bandwidth you waste. Most of 
the time you waste belongs to the recipient.

- Ever see a message that has been around the world a million times and has at least that
many E-mail addresses imbedded in it from people who forwarded it; and you have to
keep scrolling down past all the addresses to see the real message? Who is a spammer?
A spammer is ordinary people like you and me. You never know who the spammer is
because they use forged identities by buying mass E-mailers and E-mail addresses
from people who collect the addresses. I doubt if the spammers make much money, but
I imagine the people who collect and sell the addresses do. If I wanted to harvest
legitimate e-mail addresses, one thing I would do would be to make up stories, like
Little Penny Brown is Missing. That gets people's attention and they forward it to as
many people they can, providing plenty of e-mail addresses for whatever person wants
to collect them. The message might even get back to the person who started it, if not, it
will for sure wind up being received by some person who sells e-mail addresses.

There are many ways to get people's attention: made up stories about missing children,
false political statements to get you all mad, bizarre pictures that are not real but were
modified, jokes, even prayer chains and religious stories. Anything to get your attention
so that you will forward the message.

First of all, 99.9% of all forwarded messages are false. We tend to believe anything we see
in writing as fact. Last of all, the bottom line is that these messages are designed for one
reason, to harvest e-mail addresses to sell. If you still insist on forwarding these messages
to as many people as you can and you do not first delete all the e-mail addresses, you are
helping other people make money, and you are not getting paid for it. I forward my fair
share of the jokes, but first I delete all the e-mail addresses and the ads at the end.

If you are in doubt about whether a message is factual, go to www.snopes.com and do
a search. That is just one site, there are a bunch of them that research the stories.

- Never include the original message when replying unless the person you're replying to is
senile and not likely to remember what they wrote, or unless you have been away
for 6 months and are just now replying. You have the option, in Options, to include the
original message in the reply or not. Turn it off. Or you can delete the original message text
in the reply. Click and drag over the text and use the delete button.

- Especially never include the original message if somebody sent you a huge picture in-line
(not as an attachment). They don't want it back. They have a copy. They sent it to you.

- Never include the original message in a reply especially if you are replying to a forum.
The original message is already in the thread, now there are 2 of it. It snowballs. It takes
physical disc or other media space to put all this duplicated stuff, and it costs money. Not
to mention that it contributes to WWW congestion. The only time you want to include
the original message in your reply other than the above is when you are talking to tech-
support people in India and you need to keep the whole conversation intact.

- Microsoft, especially, likes for you to send HTML format messages. That is the way it
defaults. That creates messages of larger size than necessary. Turn that off and use plain
text unless you really need to send something other than plain text. And the fancy wallpaper.
Get rid of it. All it does is waste the time of others. Using plain text will get rid of the 
wallpaper and all the other glitter that takes forever to download, not to mention the
fancy fonts that give the recipient eye fatigue. Before you forward a message that is
in RTF or HTML format, convert it to plain text. That will get rid of all the smiley faces,
and other animated annoyances.

- Ever get a message and have to open 20 levels of attachments to get to the real
message? If Forward as Attachment is turned on in your options. Turn it off. If you
decide to forward the message again with 20 levels of attachments, forward it from
the last one you opened, not the one with all the attachments.

- Never send messages in little bitty text to old folks like me.

- Signatures. Nobody wants to see all your surnames as a signature more than once. Use
the option to apply the signature as needed, not as a permanent fixture on every message
you send.

- Fonts: Times New Roman (TNR) tells you the difference between 1 and  l. With Arial you
can't tell the difference. You have a choice of default fonts when you compose an e-mail
message. (This is a 1, numeral 1. This is a lower case l (L). Here is your new password
from Walmart.com: ixZvRl12l31B. Now, what is your new password? The only choice you 
have is to copy and paste and hope for the best. There is no way to keep a written record
because you can't tell the difference between 1 and l. On old typewriters, the lower case L 
and the numeral 1 key were one and the same. If you were mixing numbers and letters and
used the lower case l, you had to do this: l (L), or that 1 (one) Arial should be made just
as obsolete as old typewriters are, but it is everybody's favorite, still.)

(Well, of all things. Rootsweb has changed their font for displaying plain text. It is now a font
that distinguishes between 1 and l. I don't know what it is but it is not Arial and it makes
more of a distinction than TNR does over Arial, which they used before changing it
a while back. Or maybe it was not Rootsweb who changed something. I have no way of
knowing how; all I know is that it changed lately. Anyway, now you will have to show
yourself by composing a message in Arial and seeing for yourself.)

- Drinking and e-mail don't mix.

- Advertising in your e-mail? Are they PAYING YOU to advertise for them? NO!
Get another ISP.

More later when I get time.