 | Chris Owen
is President and founder of Hubris Communications. Until the opening of Hubris' Wichita office, Mr. Owen was the sole network technician and systems administrator of the company. Hubris Communications is a provider of premium Dial-Up, ADSL, SDSL, Wireless, and dedicated Internet Services. Founded in Garden City, Kansas and doing business since July 1995, Hubris Communications, Inc. serves over 3,200 customers in south central and southwestern Kansas. Chris can be reach at (316) 858-3000 or owenc@hubris.net |
Computers & Software
2002-01-01 14:20:00
I don’t want my e-mail address forwarded to strangers
Answer: What you are seeing when you get those emails with pages and pages of email addresses at the top are the cumulative "headers" of each of the emails that were forwarded from person to person.The headers are a set of information about that email, and include such things as: return address, subject and date the email was sent. In addition to the four or five lines that are visible in your email client there are usually between ten and twenty more lines that are normally hidden. For a full discussion of email headers see: http://www.stopspam.org/ /email/headers/headers.htmlWhen a message is forwarded from one person to another, email programs often include the visible portions of these headers as part of the forwarded message. Because of this, there really isn't any way you can prevent someone else from forwarding your email address as part of these headers. Technically, it would be possible to avoid putting your return email address in the headers you send out, however this probably wouldn't be a good idea since if you did this no one would be able to reply to your emails.What you can do though is make sure you don't fall victim to this common email mistake. Although it is sometimes appropriate to forward the headers of an email (for instance if you want to make sure the person receiving it knows where the original came from), most of the time these headers are not necessary.In fact, including the headers might even be undesirable. Not only for the privacy reason you mention, but also because they can clutter the email with unnecessary content. It can be very annoying to have to scroll down through pages and pages of unnecessary headers just to read a small amount of actual content at the bottom of the message.The solution is to make sure you edit the forwarded email before you send it on. After choosing the "Forward" command in your email program you have the opportunity to edit the message before you send it on. Instead of just adding "Though you would find this funny" to the top of the message and pressing the send button, you should highlight the headers,footers and any other unnecessary content and delete them before you send the message.In addition, when composing a message that you are going to be sending to several people at one time, you can also put the addresses of the people you are emailing in the BCC (blind carbon copy) field rather than in the TO or CC field. By doing this, the addresses you are emailing will not be shown on the receiving persons computer and will not be included as part of any forwarded headers. It won't prevent them from forwarding your email address, but it will stop them from forwarding the addresses of everyone else you are sending the message to.In short, although you can't really prevent anyone else from forwarding your address in your way, you can make sure you don't do it to anyone else. Remember: "Only you can prevent ugly emails" ;-]
