Get yourself a number of email addresses that you can use for different purposes, thus is it can be easier to delete one email address, without needing to tell your entire address book that you’ve changed.
For Example:
One of the easiest ways to get lots and lots of email addresses, you can change at will, is to actually buy yourself a .co.uk domain name or similar from somewhere like 123-reg where for around £7 for two years, you can have your own personal domain name, and all the email addresses associated with it.
You can then get virtually as many email address as you like, forwarding through to any other email address you like (ie so you can have jason@mynewdomain.co.uk forwarding through to the email address provided by your internet service provider, that way, when you change internet providers (ie from BT to NTL or similar), you don’t need to go through your entire address book to tell everyone).
To describe any part of the above in more detail, please do contact us.
For the types of emails you may want or need to publish somewhere on the web, use one of the free email service providers such as hotmail, GoogleMail, yahoo, etc. which tend to have free spam filters as part of the service (as without it, they’d be processing billions more emails everyday!)
Never send bulk emails to your friends using the To: or Cc: field. This then displays everyone’s email address to everyone else in the list. Firstly that’s like sending a photocopy of your little black book of addresses to everyone else in it, every time you do it. Secondly, once an email address is listed in this way on someone else’s computer, when their computer gets infected by a particular type of virus, it will scan the entire computer for anything that resembles anything like an email address (whether there’s been direct communication between the two people or not), and then store all these email addresses on a big database, to be sold on for fractions of a pence each, many times in the future.
Whenever you send bulk emails, use the Bcc: field instead (Blind Carbon Copy), as this will only show to the recipient, the name and address of the sender, those in the To: or Cc: field, the actual recipient, but no-one else in the Bcc: field (it actually gets sent in such a way, the big list of email addresses don’t even appear in the source code of the email.
Never forward on chain emails.
Chain Email Petitions. There is no such thing as valid email petitions (where everyone adds their name to the bottom of the list, and then forwards it through to another 10 people). The only petitions actually mean something are those completed in one central location, on a highly regarded website (such as http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ ). Even if you do find yourself at the 100th person and are then supposed to forward this on to some listed email address, you will most definitely find that the email address listed is no longer valid (and the domain it’s associated with, is now probably swamped with email addresses that aren’t valid).
Email Tracking Software, to win a prize/gift
There is no such thing as email tracking software that automatically monitors how many people you send an email onto, and then rewards you with some cash prize / vouchers from Disney, Microsoft, Marks & Spencer’s, etc.
Yes it’s true that all emails can be monitored by the Internet Service Provider for their own legal responsibilities, the Government (looking out for key words within the content of emails, or monitoring the activities of certain individuals they consider terrorist suspects, etc.).
However, just think about it.. How likely do you think some company will actually pay a lot of money to every single person that forwards on an email, with the huge number of other very cheap ways to market their business (at fractions of a pence per message view, rather than tens or thousands of pounds!)
These types of emails are normally interspersed with some ‘quotes’ from someone who forwarded it on, and great things happened to them.. or those who didn’t and bad things… The only way these types of emails will make a difference to what happens in your life, is what difference it makes to how you feel about life. If you think positively (being an optimist), positive things will happen around you. Think negatively (as a pessimist) and yes, negative things will happen. These types of emails may have some sort of moving poem or story apparently written by some 8 year old somewhere, who’s ‘dying wish…’. However, some of these emails (even if the original story may have in part been based on some sort of truth) have been doing the rounds for years and years and years!
If you want to share your good thoughts with a friend.. then contact them directly anyway, and give some specific complement about why you like them so much. Don’t just forward on something from someone else. Specific complements, such as “You’ve really inspired me by how much you give in your time and energy to the youth service you’ve been volunteering at for the past 10 years, I know everyone you’ve reached has been helped in a massive way, and their lives have all been changed for the better, as I was one of them...” is much more meaningful than forwarding on some sort of tacky poem you received from someone you hardly know!
www.BreaktheChain.org has got a massive resource (far greater than anything I can list above) describing all about chain mails. It even has an ongoing resource of current emails doing the rounds.. so before you forward on anything that looks too good to be true (as it almost certainly will be untrue), then just paste some part of the email into any search engine and you’ll see a little of its history, or just check a website like the one above.