I've been receiving joke e-mails forwarded from friends who receive them from people who are using their work e-mail addresses to send them. How can I tell? Most of the time, the e-mail address is a dead giveaway. But, like all forwarded e-mails that are not cleaned up of coded tick marks and e-mail addresses of multiple recipients, there's this "disclaimer" at the bottom of many of these e-mails:
"The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that your access is unauthorized, and any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message including any attachments is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer."
Interesting! So what this disclaimer is saying is that I'm not authorized to read the joke because it was not originally intended to be read by me. Oh, God forbid the FBI comes knocking down my door for reading someone else's e-mail not intended for me and being notified of such! I'd better get off the Internet and bolt my doors right now! Oh, dread! Oh, worry!
Oh puhleeze!!!!
When it comes to jokes, cartoons, or other non-work or personal e-mails, these disclaimers are so annoying. They're impotent at best. Is someone really going to take the time to contact the author of the e-mail and tell him/her that they accidentally received it? What if someone sinister accidentally received it? Do you think a stern disclaimer is going to stop him from "sharing" the contents of the e-mail with others?
I know I'm bordering on the ridiculous here. What I wish people would do is clean up these e-mails to remove other people's e-mail addresses and the little codes and characters embedded into the contents of the e-mail.
It's not that hard, actually. Open up your WordPad program, then copy and paste original body of the e-mail onto the page. Then select "edit" then "replace" at the top of the screen. In the "find what" space, type in the "> " character with a space right after it. Leave "replace with" blank. Then click on "replace all." Do the same thing, but this time, remove that space after the ">" in the "find what" space. Doesn't the contents look better already? A little more adjusting might be needed, like deleting extra spaces to make two lines of text into one line of text. It doesn't take much time nor effort to "clean" up the contents and make them easier to read.
There is another benefit to this trick ... it reduces the bandwidth needed to send the e-mail. You might not think it would be important, but think about this: have you been on the Internet and it seems your service suddenly slows down or is slow when you log on? The main reason is bandwidth usage. The more bandwidth being used, the slower the affected Internet servers are. One e-mail may seem harmless. However, when you multiply that e-mail by millions of people, it adds up. That is one of the main reasons e-mail spam is so reviled and considered the scourge of the Internet; spam uses up A LOT of bandwidth.
Hmmm ... I started with one topic and finished with another. I guess that's my bohemian thought process at work. My mind wanders from one subject to another. :-P
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