The return-to-unsender syndrome. This complaint was pointed out to me by a park visitor recently. Seems some folks like to be amateur SPAMers in a really cheap way. It happens when cousin Doofis or your buddy Dellbert sends out a joke or a digital picture of his toothless, drooling face, to every person in his email address book. Each person receiving a copy of the worn-out, recycled joke also gets a long list of email addresses (all the copy-to or CC email addresses) that received the message. The low-integrity SPAMer "harvests" these email unacquaintances and includes them as recipients in the next shipment of his (or her) garbage. So, without ever sending something out to this nerd or knowing who the heck it is, you'll get something back. If your email editor allows you the ability, list this name dropper as someone to reject email from. Better still, download the free utility called Spam Buster from ZD Net. It will allow you to reject and delete email without ever downloading it from your email server.

The not-so-great greater-than symbol (>). This is one of the main reasons I decided to create the email Etiquette page. Unless you're doing logic problems by email, or writing HTML code for web pages, you should never see a > . This infamous, moronic symbol appears by the thousands in my email messages every month. Here's a thought: the longer a text message is, the larger the email file is to send, and the longer it takes to go from your computer to the recepient's. I wonder how much the internet is slowed just because of the millions of these useless symbols traveling back and forth in email messages every day. I guarantee it makes a measurable difference. And all for... what?!? What purpose does it serve? None whatsoever. There is absolutely NO intelligent reason to have extra symbols of any kind trashing your email messages.
The fix? There are two:

[1] TURN IT OFF! Go into your email options or preferences and find the setting that's stupidly shoving hundreds of > symbols in your face, and deselect it. If that option isn't available then you need to look for an email editor that wasn't written by some fifth grader high on twinkies.

[2] Edit them out. If you're going to send/resend jokes, recipes, mushy 'chainmails' and they're packed full of that scourge of the decade, delete them. How? Copy/paste the entire email message into Word or Wordpad. Do a find/replace to replace all the > symbols with nothing (leave the 'replace with' block blank). Then copy the cleaned up text back into your email editor (preferably into a NEW email message). That's it. If you use Word, you can also apply the spell checker to your message to correct any spelling errors. Then paste it back into the email editor.

Too much overhead(ers). Just like all the other trash in email, headers are useless information that bulk up the message size, slowing it down in internetland. How hard can it be to eliminate them? When replying, put the cursor at the top of the message (above the 753 headers which have accumulated), hold down the shift key, then press and hold the down-arrow key. This will start you moving down the message, highlighting everything as you go. When you reach the end of the headers, release the arrow key, then release the shift key. Press the Delete key. Headers are gone. Wow... that was easy, wasn't it?!? THEN DO IT!!!

The 20-story attachment. This is another internet nightmare. How about those email messages that arrive with an attachment? You click on the attachment only to find... another attachment! Sometimes the attached file is burried so deep in sub-attachments that you'll spend a minute just closing all the levels back down. Also, and this is the killer, I've received multi-level attachments (as much as ten deep) and noticed the attachment file size drop to half of what it started out as. Each time you attach a file, the size of it grows due to some administrative trickery carried on by the email editor. I received an email the other day with a 6K attachment. Eight levels later, I found the first level attachment was 1K! Imagine how this bloats a simple email message with attachment. Especially done thousands of times every day all through the internet. Once again, the size of a file determines how long it takes it to be sent. If you double the file's size, you may double the length of time needed to travel from your computer to your friend's.

What's even more stupendous is that when you finally get down to the attachment, it's usually just a text file! Hello!... attachments are for documents, programs, pictures, etc. NOT FOR TEXT! Your email editor is for text. It can HANDLE text. If you want to send a joke/story, highlight the text you want, copy it, then paste it into a new email message. You're done. Even simpler, FORWARD it. But be aware that not all email editors treat attachments the same. You may forward an email with an attachment, but that message could very well arrive without the attachment.

I've stallen and can't get up! While we're on the subject of attachments, ever log on, open your email editor to check for new messages, and have the new email download process stall out? I have. It's usually caused by someone sending a giant email attachment... a game, software, pictures, plans for an aircraft carrier, etc. I once received a nastygram from my ISP stating that my email message space on their server was full, and I needed to download/delete some messages. Space allowed for email on you're ISP's server varies (so I've read) from one to five megs. Mine is five. The reason for the nastygram that time was someone had sent me a 5+ meg attachment from a commercial (high speed) network line. It wasn't anything for them to send it (time wise), but it exceeded my message space and would have taken me an hour or two to download. I couldn't get rid of it, and I couldn't get any new messages. (New, incoming messages were dumped or returned to sender). I had to download a program called MailCall that would allow me to view/delete email messages from my server directly (see below). Once I got rid of the message with the giant attachment, I began receiving email again. Solution? If you want to send a giant attachment to someone, ASK FIRST! Don't just clog up their server space with ugly, rude attachments. Next time, I'm going to send the attachment back. Twice! NOTE: MailCall is a free program available from ZDNet.

Sick of the virus. There are more hoax-mongers on the web than there are virus writers/distributors. It's quite common to receive one or two virus warnings each month. Most of them are nothing more than a hoax. One of the best ways to tell if it's phoney is the ever present "send this to as many people as you know" line somewhere in the message. Usually at the bottom. The easiest thing to do is look up the suspect virus on Rob Rosenberger's Computer Virus Myths site, or The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's Urban Legends site (Barbara and David P. Mikkelson). There's a ton of information at these sites, and you can look up a virus or hoax name to see if it's true or false.

The one-joke-per-email glut. Ever receive ten emails from one person only to find one joke/story per message? And don't even think about each one being a ten-level attachment email. Highlight/copy/paste the ten jokes from the ten emails into ONE email message. Send that to your fellow joke collectors. When I receive several jokes I want to keep, I'll paste them all into one email message to myself and send it. Then when I receive that email, I move it into a 'keep' folder.

Copy/paste. Most Windows programs that have to do with text use the same shortcuts for copy and paste (don't tell Microsoft about this or they'll change it... surely they don't realize this!). You can highlight text in a snap with your mouse. Place the cursor at the beginning of any text you wish to highlight, press the left mouse button and hold it while you sweep down through all the text you want. (Or, just hit Ctrl-A and highlight everything on the page. You must place the cursor somewhere on the page you want to highlight). Release the mouse button, then press Ctrl-C (Control key and C key at the same time). This will place all the highlighted text into the 'clipboard' (shared by almost all Windows programs). Place the mouse cursor at the point you wish to paste the copied text (in the same document or in another Windows program's document). This means placing the cursor where you want it and press the left mouse button once. Then press Ctrl-V (Control key and V key at the same time). This will paste the highlighted/copied text starting at the cursor. The copied text will remain in the clipboard (paste again and again) until you highlight/copy a new block of text. If you highlight text and do a Ctrl-X (Control key and X key at the same time) the highlighted text will be copied AND deleted from where it was at the same time. You can then paste the text anywhere else, including right back where you just deleted it from if you feel you made a mistake.