It was 1996 when I was introduced to this magical facility where I could send my heart to the people whom I wanted to tell all these details, that too within flash of a second. Yes I am talking about Email that we are so habitual of using today. I used to access my yahoo mail through the dial up connection on my bosses machine. I did not used to receive much of the emails back then though. Only a few Ad mailers from yahoo partner sites. Later came other web mails and I used many of them including MSN(Hotmail), Rediff, AOL, Gmail, Indiatimes and my official Email through the email clients provided by the offices where I worked. It was a medium where we could communicate easy and fast. Hundreds and thousands of mails from friends, family, colleagues and clients. But this progress in technology also brought few annoyances. The virus, the trojans and the hackers. Of all these the biggest annoyance that I would rate is the Spam and unmindful forwarded emails.
Today a normal IT guy would spend first half to one hour of his day in scanning through tons of mails which he receive daily. Of these mails many are the forwarded mails. So now let us discuss whether we should forward that funniest joke mail or may be a very beautiful image message. I actually like sharing a great mail with people close to me and do forward a mail or two to my friends and family. But Hey stop. Think for a while. Am I adding another useless mail to already a long list of mails in my friend's mailbox? As an It guy I would like to see my business mails first thing in the morning (We all have the deadlines and targets to meet). I might like to read these entertainment mails (as I would like to call them) later in the day or maybe when I am done for the day. But that too not for very long, may be a mail or two in a week. So how do I ensure that I receive only the relevant mails or the minimum of these unmindful forwards? Isn't it simple? Send the only the mails which you think is really the veryyyyyyyyyy goooooood. But the rational should be applied to both few mails and only to a few people.
Here I would also talk about the mails which we all come across every now and then. "Send this mail to XX people and your wish will come true". Has anyone of you ever been able to get the wish granted by sending such mails. If the answer is yes please post me here I would be a good opportunely which many like me are missing. Please do me a favor and make me aware of your wish that was granted. I assure you, I will not be jealous instead I'll be a happy for you. I would rate those "Free goodies offer" mails in the same category. Remember no company is gong to give out that latest product out of its factory just to get you forwarding the mails. There is nothing called "FREE Lunch" you know.
All said about these mails which generate unnecessary traffic on the mail servers. Now there is one more kind of mail which do the damage not only in terms of clogged mailboxes but also have a very bad aspect to it. These mails are generally the hate mails against an authority, a company or may be a community. The other day I received a mail claiming how some Indian news channels kept talking about the celebrity going to pray in a temple while an India army officer laid his life in battle against a deadly terrorist and managed to bring this bad guy down. Only BBC covered this news. I seriously bow in this officers respect but am not sure whether these big news channels are really so careless as not to cover this for the sake of a celebrity news. May be the guy who initiated this mail has genuinely come across such a gross negligence of not one but all new channels. But did the people who forwarded this mail actually confirm the authenticity of this mail. May be this was just an intended joke. But by forwarding this mail you are bringing nothing but the distrust towards the society (television today is no doubt the part of our society). One similar mail talked about airport authorities manhandling the visitors just to dupe them of their valuables and cash. This is reticules. Do we know what kind of bad name we bring to our country buy forwarding these mails without checking the authenticity of these mails? These kind of mails are strict No No. At least till reconfirming the authenticity.
Rest I leave it to you fine people to think and adopt the way which you think is most appropriate. This is my try to put forward what I think is a bad practice and should be checked. Bye for now and keep me posted. Let us bring good practices to our society.
