Email Garbage

From my site at http://www.markgillis.com/Dont_Forward.html:

Hurry! Forward this email! Urgent!!!


You've received emails with titles like this. We all have. The question is, what do you do after you get one? Do you slavishly forward it? To everyone? If so, slap yourself, hard and often, on your inner thighs, until redness and swelling occur. When people get emails from you, they roll their eyes and make guttural grunting noises.


Want to not be that person? Then think about some motives on the part of the crafters of these wastes of time and bandwidth. These are some of the ways they fool you and get you to do their bidding:


a) Appeal to Authority. By telling you a given email is "approved by" or "verified" by some highly-recognizable entity or organization, the creators of these garbage messages attempt to convince you to obey their command to forward, forward, forward.

b)Appeal to Emotion. By presenting you with a sob story, a situation which pulls on your heart strings, the evil crafters of email garbage attempt to get you to obey by making you feel like an ass if you don't. I mean, who wouldn't want to help find a lost little girl, or adopt a litter of cute puppies, or feed an entire hungry village? Somehow, they get you to suspend disbelief that forwarding an email will accomplish any of these things.

c)Appeal to Greed. Oh yes, all you have to do is forward the crap to all your (soon to be ex-) friends, and Bill Gates or AOL or God or somebody will magically count each time it's forwarded, and send you some huge check. For doing nothing. And people fall for it.

d)Appeal to Fear. If you don't forward the email, rapists will go unpunished, gang members will shoot you while driving without lights, you will get a hypo full of AIDS in the ass at a movie theatre, or will just have plain bad luck for a million years. Unless, of course, you instantly forward the trash message.

e)Appeal to Curiosity. "after you send this message to al least 9 people, an Angel will appear on your screen and ventilate her spleen into your coffee cup! I don't know how it works but IT DOES!!"... Please. Anyone with the education and experience of a rutabaga would not fall for this. Yet there are too many people who fall for it, repeatedly, over and over. And the angel never does show up, let alone leave DNA behind. Bummer.


If any email comes in that looks like it meets one of these criteria, trash it. Feel completely guilt and worry free. As the high priest of email purity, I absolve your soul of any stain of sin for not forwarding any email garbage to anyone and everyone you have ever heard of. In other words, nothing bad will happen when you simply delete the email. You were happy before the email came in, right? So what gave email the right to get all up in your inbox and take over your life, commanding you to do things? Nothing, that's what.


Break the chain. Stop the madness. Free yourself of the chains of email-obedience! Revolt against those who would command you to forward/copy!


It's your life, it's your inbox, it's your email. Screw them.


Now, right away, forward this to all your friends, and all their friends, and everyone in your time zone, and all their friends. Spend the next 6 hours gathering email addresses, and forward it to them, too. I command it! If you don't, goat-less boys in Bratswanna-Land will starve, puppies will be exiled to the moon, the Communist Party of Tupperware will take over your PTA, and Bill Gates won't send you the bazillion dollar check he's already written and signed, just waiting for you to press "send" so he can mail it to you...


Sounds dumb, right? Congratulations, it is dumb. If you found yourself clicking "forward", right now, go find a large monkey wrench, beat your computer to small bits, eat the bits, then sit on the wrench until it rust-glues to your backside.