How to email your internet jokes to your friends!

What kind of title is this, you may rightfully think. Well, a very valid indeed. How often have you come across emails sent to you by friends and relatives with some sort of viral Internet content that friend sends to friend, colleague to colleague, and before you can spell "Scheveningen" the email has gone around the planet ten times and more, faster than the speed of light! In that process, your own email adress travelled along too, by the way. Because most of us are too lazy to think how to transmit this type of content to another soul. Or too ignorant. Together with the hundreds of others' email addresses too. And before you know... there come all the spams into your inbox! And try to get rid of them buggers next. No way! This posting is about how to avoid all that.

So, learn to transmit these funny buggers properly. Here's the way.

1. First, you decide you wanna forward this further and to whom.
2. Next, you hit forward on the mail you just received. 
3. Third, you put your target recipient addresses in the BCC field. That's extremely important. The Blind BCC field is the only one you have to consider. Neither the TO, nor the CC fields.
4. Fourth, you clean any headers from the email contents that you are forwarding: These appear just in front of your useful content and are put there automatically each time you forward any received email to someone else. The headers contain email adresses of other recipients that have got the item as part of its cyber bounce from desktop to desktop that it started ever since it left the first originator's computer. 
5. Also, don't forget to scroll to the end of the message as there's a lot of garbage there too, automatically added by (mainly) company mail servers, about how to save trees by not printing the message, or some legal lingo about confidentiality rights and BS like this...
6. Only thing you can now see is your recipients in the BCC field, and your 'funny' content. 
7. Hit Send!

Anyone who receives such a message will only see that it's coming from you and might have some good laughs or curse you for wasting his/her time, but that's it.

Another thing I do, is keep separate email groups where I keep my recipients' email adresses organized. Mine are like this:

• Soft: normal jokes and content, not obscene, minimum nudity (if at all), soft anecdotes. 
• Hard: spicy (sometimes XXX) stuff, that I get from time to time from dudes in my inner circle (four or five blokes located in Europe, UK and the US)
• Kids: a bunch of young adults, many of them students, and my own siblings and some of their friends, between 20 and 30 yrs of age, that is.
• Family: Spouse and own family members.

My forwarding process is as described above. I used to forward everything I got in the past, to make people laugh (I thought), but nowadays, I'm pretty selective. I never transmit racial jokes, or extra vulgar nudity (even to my Hard core group) and I often send interesting serious stuff... I think. The fact that quite a few of my recipients react these days with approving remarks, tells me I'm not wasting their time.

The golden rule about sending something to someone: If in doubt, DON'T DO IT!