I opened a forwarded email from a friend the other day, and to my horror, saw this:

I was greeted by a long list of email addresses, before actually getting to what the message was about. Before forwarding a message, some formating needs to be done.

It’s important to check the message is true before passing it along. A site I use is called Snopes.com. Users can search for email messages they’ve received and check whether they are true or not true at all. In this case, one of the people who received this message had added a message saying that they had verified that it was true and provided a link.

After verifying the message, remove those email addresses from the message and format the message to look a little nicer. Imagine if you were the one composing the message and sending it to your friends. How would you like it to look when they got it?

When it’s time to select people to forward the message to, look for a “Bcc” option (which stands for “blind carbon copy”), instead of using the “To” field. This way, recipients won’t see who else got the message and be able to steal the sender’s friends’ email addresses. Usually, there is a link to click that says “Show Bcc” located near the “To” box in order to see the box to add users to it. When a user clicks on “Bcc” in most cases, it will open a list of contacts that can be selected to be added to that box.

Here is what the email should have looked like when I received it.

As seen above, the email looks much nicer and I don’t have to scroll down for eternity to find the message.

P.S. Sometimes, I’ll get a message with a video attachment. This clogs up my inbox and space on my computer (if using a computer-based email client). Instead, find the video on YouTube and post a link to it instead.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t use Hotmail. I use GMail!