Email 101

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman, super-smart physicist dude

Mr. Feynman may have been talking about scientific experimentation when he uttered the above, but I feel it's something that can be applied to other aspects of our lives. Take emails, for example.

Ah, email! I do love it so. Unfortunately, as I've learned over the last 15 years, it has its challenges.

Based on the emails that I'm still getting after all this time, it seems there is nothing more difficult to keep a rational head about than mass-forwarded emails. Terrifying urban myths, animated gifs of Jesus holding a kitten, emails with 50-point pink font assuring me that I am the sender's BEST friend (or a STRONG woman or a CLASSY lady). There's the blatantly racist emails with "jokes" attributed to poor George Carlin, ones trying to prove 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy (or predicted by Nostradamus, or a government conspiracy), and ones assuring me that my government gives more money to those shiftless, lazy refugees than our own seniors.

It's enough to make your head spin! How can you possibly get through them with your sanity in tact? Well, I think it might be a good time to go over some ground rules about mass-forwarded emails that the neophyte might not be aware of, and the oldophyte might do well to remember.

1. Every mass-forwarded email you receive, no matter how plausible or innocuous, is a lie.
It might be amusing, it might be clever, it might cite air-tight references like "my hairdresser's doctor said", but it is most definitely a lie.

Case in point: the other day I received an email that showcased incredible paper art that blew my mind with it's inventiveness and delicacy.







The email said that these pictures were part of a contest for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and that the contest stipulated that they could only use ONE piece of paper. Holy cow, how awesome!

However, something about the similarity of the pictures made me suspicious, so before I forwarded it on myself (I thought it was just that cool), I did some checking. Guess what? It was a lie! For no apparent reason!

Seems these are all from the same artist, a Danish guy named Peter Callesen, who may or may not have used one single sheet of paper for each of these (his website doesn't really specify). Does it make the art any less remarkable? Does it make me feel any less of a talentless hack who can't fold up a paper airplane without devolving into a blubbering mass of paper cuts and tears? No, it does not. So I'm not sure what the lie was supposed to add to the email.

It's the same kind of pointless lie as a person claiming they were born in Harrow, Ontario instead of their real birthplace: Chatham, Ontario. It makes no difference to anyone which god-forsaken southern Ontario backwater they were born in, so why would they lie about it? The answer of course is, nobody knows.

However, it seems that there is nothing too trivial for people to lie about. Therefore, my recommendation is to always check Snopes.com, the Skeptic's Dictionary or your own common sense before believing an email, and most especially, before sending it on.

2. Email isn't magic.
There is no way in hell your computer will start to play a video to you simply because you forwarded an email on to x number of people. Disney cannot track how many emails are forwarded from your computer in order to send you money, give you a free trip, or grant you eternal youth. You won't find out who your secret admirer is by hitting "forward", and you're not going to save an ailing child by hitting "send". Email just doesn't work that way.

Email hucksters seem to be able to trick people easily because most people have no idea how email works. It's a lot like a car in that respect. You might know the basics of how to use it, but you don't really know what goes on behind the scenes. But trust me, email is about as magical as your Honda Civic.

If someone told you that driving to the grocery store and back ten times would make a certain song come on the radio the next time you turned on the car, you'd assume that they were mentally retarded and react accordingly, perhaps by smiling politely, patting them on the head and giving them a cookie. However, when people are told the same thing via email, somehow it is given a lot more credence. Here's a hint: If it sounds utterly impossible, it is.

Of course there are always those people who say, "I don't know if this will work, but I'll forward it on anyway. Why the heck not?!" The heck not is because you're essentially spamming your family and friends, filling their inboxes with nonsense and clogging their mail servers (and yours) with crap.

Also, see Rule #1.

3. You are allowed to edit emails that you forward.
Your ability to delete superfluous text in an email does not end once you hit the "forward" button. If you've done your due diligence to make sure you're not forwarding some outrageous lie - or you know it's a lie and you still feel it warrants re-forwarding - please go in and delete all of the ugly extraneous information in the email first.

Not only is it tedious to scroll through 37 versions of other people's thoughts (this is hilarious! so true!1! lolz!), that gobbledygook at the top of each email contains actual personal information that should not be forwarded to all and sundry. Do all of your friends a favour and delete it.

You also don't have to keep the 50-point pink font that screams at the unsuspecting recipient, either. You are allowed, nay greatly encouraged, to go in and turn it into something reasonable and tasteful. Your friends' retinas will thank you.

It's also a good idea to put your email addresses in the BCC field rather than the To field so that your recipients won't see every one of your friend's email addresses. You wouldn't give out all of your friends' telephone numbers to a bunch of strangers, would you?

You would? Wow, you're a real jerk, you know that?

4. Common courtesy only takes 4 little letters
Lord knows we all love a good dirty joke. However, you should remember that many people you are sending your amusingly saucy email to are perhaps opening it up at work. We've all had the unsettling sensation of clicking on an image in an email that is simply entitled "Ouch!1!", only to have a huge jpg fill the screen with an unfortunate naked man whose testicles are humourously caught in a wringer washer. This, of course, is the exact moment that the boss strolls up to ask about those TPS reports. Later that week, Sexual Harassment Sensitivity Training is scheduled for the whole office. Ouch, indeed.

All of this could have been avoided had the picture been labelled "Ouch!1! (NSFW)", which simply means Not Safe For Work. If you love your friend enough to send him/her a photograph of a man getting his junk hilariously crushed by an antique appliance, surely you love him/her enough to let them know to wait until it's safe to view it.

5. Other people's inboxes are not the place for your ill-informed, poorly researched, atrociously-spelled second-hand opinions
If any of these words appear in an email that you're thinking of righteously mass-forwarding, DO NOT:

redneck
immigrant
Jesus Christ
welfare
George W. Bush
blessings/god/prayer
John Edwards (the douche bag who pretends to talk to dead people, not the presidential candidate. Okay, maybe him, too.)
9/11
rag heads
politically correct
Intelligent design

Man, I could be here all day with this list... Hm. Here's a good rule of thumb: if you preface your email with something like, "FINALLY, someone has the guts to speak the truth!!1!", chances are the email is offensive to someone on your list. I'm not saying you don't have a right to your ill-informed opinion, I'm just saying don't force it on your whole address book of contacts. If you do, be prepared for rebuttal emails, often ones that are well-researched and tend to make you look like a bit of a dick.

Or, if you feel you must forward it, please take the time to pick and choose people in your address list who you feel share your opinions (i.e. NOT me), do not just shotgun it to everyone. Also, and this is important, see Rule #1.

Myself, I would heartily welcome mass emails that contain the following phrases:

critical thought
James Randi
the Socratic method
Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert/Lewis Black
secular humanism
tolerance
cultural relativism
Jason Statham (I'm only human)

Of course, my chances of getting a mass-forwarded email like that are as likely as me never getting any from the first list again. I.e. not bloody. But a girl can dream, can't she?

In any event, those are my general rules to anyone struggling with using email in this day and age. (There's probably a few more, but I'm not allowed to go past the number five in my blog posts.) I haven't touched on real spam, as there are plenty of sources out there to explain how to deal with that, and some who are much funnier than I am to boot.

Email is a great tool for communicating with friends, sharing a laugh or two, or avoiding having to actually talk to a human. Embrace it, have fun with it, but above all, don't forget to use the most important tool in your arsenal: that thing encased in bone and hair that sits just above your shoulders!

(Your brain, I'm talking about your brain.)