Should you want to forward me (or anyone else) information that you received, please think about the following:

1. If you send a mail out to your complete list for a funny story or anything the like, for as long as you put all emails in the “to” or the “cc” field, I can see and use them. If any of the people you’ve mailed the funny stuff to decides to forward it to all of his contacts, not only will these guys receive all of his contacts, but all of your contacts too (unless the guy was clever enough to remove them). You will doubtlessly note that there is a chance of getting emails full of people’s email-addresses, addresses that are checked regularly, at work or at home. Now imagine how happy these emails can make someone involved in “spamming”, receiving a funny email, that actually contains loads and loads of valuable emails, and all for free!!! (in case you forgot, your email AND my email is in it too) So please be considerate, and DON’T contribute to my daily load of spam-mails! If you want to send me these emails, send them separately from the rest of your address-book, or….much better….put everyone you send the mail to in “BCC” (Blind Copy Carbon). Not only will I not see the rest of your address-book, but they can’t even be forwarded!!! And should you need to put an address in the “TO” field, If it is funny enough to mass-mail it to everyone, I’m sure you won’t mind sending it to yourself a second time .
2. Last but not least on this subject, I suggest you put a text in your mass-mails (FW:’s and the such) that tells people about this, or at least with instructions: “Please read this, IMPORTANT: Should you wish to forward this email, remove all email-addresses already contained in this message, and don’t divulge the contents of your address-book to everyone in your address-book. See http://contact.bisi.lu for more details” or something like that.3. If you receive a more serious email, about helping someone, or warning about something, have a very doubtful attitude! I have received emails that contained pictures of kids, missing somewhere, and the email didn’t even contain contact details in case you knew where the kid was??? Even if the info were true, it would not in any case make sense to forward the email…
3. If the email contains anything the like, or warnings about dangerous products or “needles in cinema that were infected with HIV” or the such, have a search on google, add the more special wordings to the search, e.g. “HIV, cinema, birmingham, warning”, and it will lead you to a website like the following on which you can see that this email was nothing but a hoax.
4. You might even forward me a mail without you knowing about it. This is caused by virii, and they spread in that way. In order to avoid this, it is important that you have regular virus-scans, and if you don’t have a scanner, get the “Free Antivir” which I’ve been using for a while, it is quite ok.

People, PLEASE don’t help corrupting the internet and my inbox . Be smart, be safe, and if in doubt, ask me!

N.B. I have recently ago read an interesting article about people that forward chainmails becoming the target of scammers…and they become targets once their email is found in one of the forwarded chainmails