Forwarding emails - part 2

I'd just like to add to the previous post on "Add recipients to BCC"...

This is an overly simplistic view, but hopefully effective in it's purpose:

Before you forward any email, think... Could this be just spam.

Any email you recieve pleading to you to forward this email or some poor little kid with no arms and legs will miss out on a life threatening operation IS 100% SPAM. Don't forward it! You will just be contributing to the masses of JUNK mail slowing down the internet. No ISP would or could legally track anyone's emails.

How harmless is forwarding 1 email?

Think about this: if 1 email is 20 kilobytes - nothing much and quite insignificant. But suppose you forward this to 10 people, and they forward it to 10 people and so on (10 isn't a big number and i bet you could do more).

The first send makes up : 20,000 (20Kb) x 10 = 200,000 bytes, or half a megabyte. (starting to sound a bit more significant, but not much still...)

The second send would be 10 x 10 x 20Kb = 2,000,000 (or approx 2 megabytes).

Now this is sounding bigger isn't it?

The third send would be 10 x 10 x 10 x 20Kb = 20,000,000 or 20 Megabytes. Can you imagine... in a matter of seconds 1 email can grow to use up 20Mb of Internet bandwidth.

Lets fastforward to the 10th send:

That's 20,000 x 10^10 =

... breathe ...

100000000000 x 20,000 = 200000000000000

... put some commas in:

200,000,000,000,000 bytes or approximately 200,000,000 Mb or 200,000 Gb, or 200,000 Tb... And thats in a matter of clicks!!!!

Now if we could stop all this garbage email, can you imagine how quick the internet could truely be?

DW.

PS: Not a lecture, but a bit to think about.