Cynthia Armistead

You just received a let­ter from your cousin. It’s very inter­est­ing and con­tains sec­tions you’d like to dis­cuss with your brother, office mates, and neigh­bor. Do you pho­to­copy the let­ter and mail copies to those peo­ple? No! In fact, you don’t even think about it, do you? It’s too much of a has­sle, so the most you’re likely to do is say “I got a let­ter from Jan­ice today and just couldn’t stop laugh­ing. That tod­dler of hers is a pill!” the next time you talk to your brother.

Email, unfor­tu­nately, is all too easy to share. If Jan­ice emailed you about the lat­est antics of lit­tle Attila, you might have imme­di­ately for­warded them to your brother, neigh­bor, depart­ment at work, and pos­si­bly all the rel­a­tives for who you have email addresses.

I already talked about mass-forwarded emails, but for­ward­ing emails in gen­eral (or post­ing them to news­groups or dis­cus­sion boards) sim­ply isn’t some­thing that needs to be done with­out a fair amount of con­sid­er­a­tion. With a very few excep­tions (described below), it is extremely rude to for­ward email writ­ten to you per­son­ally or sent to a mail­ing list to which you sub­scribe with­out the express per­mis­sion of the per­son who wrote the email. It is a vio­la­tion of the sender’s pri­vacy — much like secretly tape-recording your phone calls with some­one, then play­ing the tape for some­one else.

Some mail­ing lists explic­itly state that mes­sages from the list are not to be sent to or read by any­one who isn’t a list sub­scriber. It shouldn’t be nec­es­sary to make that kind of state­ment, but it is. On sup­port lists or other forums to which mem­bers post very pri­vate, per­sonal infor­ma­tion, hav­ing mes­sages for­warded off-list can destroy the sense of safety which is vital to mak­ing the lists valuable.

If you’re for­ward­ing infor­ma­tion from mail­ing lists which aren’t per­sonal, but infor­ma­tional — why? If you think the per­son or list­mem­bers to whom you’re for­ward­ing the infor­ma­tion would find that list valu­able, give them infor­ma­tion on how to sub­scribe to the list. Don’t for­ward every Cool-Word-of-the-Day, This Day in His­tory, and Daily Quote mes­sage to other lists or peo­ple! I’ve found that this ten­dency is espe­cially com­mon on home­school­ing lists, but I have yet to fig­ure out why any­one does it. I have actu­ally set up fil­ters to auto­mat­i­cally delete mes­sages from cer­tain list­mem­bers who are chronic offend­ers. Yes, I prob­a­bly miss real, per­sonal posts with inter­est­ing con­tent from those peo­ple at times, but their noise-to-signal ratio is just too much for me to bother going through most of their messages.

Don’t for­ward mes­sages with attached files — screen savers, exe­cutable Christ­mas cards, Pow­er­Point slide shows of inspi­ra­tional quotes super­im­posed on nature scenes, etc. If you run across some­thing which is just too mar­velous to keep to your­self, let the other peo­ple who you know would also appre­ci­ate it know where to find it. Those files can take a long time to down­load and clog up people’s mail­boxes, and might even con­tain viruses.

Yes, I said there are excep­tions. They are:

• Harass­ing or abu­sive mes­sages — any­one who writes that kind of thing auto­mat­i­cally gives up any expec­ta­tion of cour­tesy. You owe the sender no con­sid­er­a­tion, no respect of his pri­vacy, noth­ing — except com­plaints to any sys­tem used to send the mes­sage and, in extreme cases, a police report.
• Mes­sages which the sender expressly states that you have per­mis­sion to for­ward. Some­times the sender will request that you leave the mes­sage intact — includ­ing, for instance, copy­right infor­ma­tion, or instruc­tions on how to sub­scribe to the mail­ing list to which the mes­sage was sent.
• Mes­sages from a com­mer­cial enter­prise that are not per­sonal in nature. For instance, it is com­mon for posters in news­groups to post responses con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion they’ve received from com­pa­nies about prod­ucts of spe­cial inter­est to the read­ers of that news­group. Shar­ing these mes­sages is very sim­i­lar to pass­ing an inter­est­ing cat­a­log around to your friends or officemates.

Yes, I occa­sion­ally for­ward mes­sages to other peo­ple. If one of the daily news alerts I read con­tains notice of a recall on a prod­uct which I know that a friend or fam­ily mem­ber is likely to have, I will for­ward that notice to the per­son with a per­sonal note. I don’t post the notice to every news­group and mail­ing list I’m on, though. If the Word-of-the-Day mail­ing list mes­sage for the day is about a word that I know will amuse one of my friends, I for­ward that mes­sage to that par­tic­u­lar friend — but not every per­son I know.

Just think before you for­ward, please.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished Jan­u­ary 2001