Slobberknocking while wondering whatever happened to Richard O' Brien: I have scaled the peak of Mount Urbana. I have seen the vision. I will bring it back to you, my gentle readers. Behold: The Eight Commandments of E-Mail! I. Thou shalt not believe stupid claims about mega-corporations. Big companies don't do business via chain letter. Bill Gates is not giving you $1000, and Disney is not giving you a free vacation. There is no baby food company issuing class-action checks. You can relax; there is no need to pass it on "just in case it's true". Furthermore, just because someone said in the message, four generations back, that "we checked it out and it's legit", does not actually make it true. II. Thou shalt not take Urban Legends as gospel. There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans. No one is waking up in a bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to their cousin. If you are hellbent on believing the kidney-theft ring stories, please see: http://urbanlegends.tqn.com/library/weekly/aa062997.htm And I quote: "The National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly issued requests for actual victims of organ thieves to come forward and tell their stories. None have." That's "none" as in "zero". Not even your friend's cousin. Also, Neiman Marcus doesn't really sell a $250 cookie recipe. And even if they do, we all have it. And even if you don't, you can get a copy at: http://www.bl.net/forwards/cookie.html Then, if you make the recipe, decide the cookies are that awesome, feel free to pass the recipe on. And even if the latest NASA rocket disaster(s) DID contain plutonium that went to particulate over the eastern seaboard, do you REALLY think this information would reach the public via an AOL chain-letter? Craig Shergold in England is not dying of cancer or anything else at this time and would like everyone to stop sending him their business cards. He apparently is also no longer a "little boy" either. III. Thou shalt not oversend the humorous item. We all know all 500 ways to drive your roommates crazy, irritate co-workers and creep out people on an elevator. We also know exactly how many engineers, college students, Usenet posters and people from each and every world ethnicity it takes to change a lightbulb. If you still absolutely MUST forward that 10th-generation message from a friend, at least have the decency to trim the eight miles of headers showing everyone else who's received it over the last 6 months. It sure wouldn't hurt to get rid of all the ">" that begin each line. Besides, if it has gone around that many times -- I've probably already seen it. IV. Thou shalt leave the technology warnings to the experts. There is no "Good Times" virus. In fact, you should never, ever, ever forward any email containing any virus warning unless you first confirm it at an actual site of an actual company that actually deals with virii. Try: http://www.norton.com and even then, don't forward it. We don't care. V. Thou shalt not steal CC: or mailing lists from other messages. If you get a message from, say, The Ticktionary, and you think, "Hey... those people would really enjoy hearing about my Widget Replacement Service," ignore the urge. Do not copy it. Do not place it. DO NOT SEND IT. All you're doing is a) insuring your message will not be read, and b) making people leery to receive further e-mail from the original poster. Then again, if your CC: list is regularly longer than the actual content of your message, you're probably going to Hell anyway. VI. Thou shalt not choke thy neighbor's modem. Yes, we know the picture of Bill, Hillary, and Monica naked in bed is humorous, and a decent job of photo morphing. If it's over 50K, though, it will be viewed as an abomination. Trick is, there's no way around downloading the attachment. That's fine if you have a T3 connection at work, but very few of us have that at home, and an hour and a half download time for seven mail messages is enough to make you break out the dress blues. If you REALLY must share the image, place it on your web page or server, then send the address out in your mail. VII. Thou shalt respect thine readers' e-mail system. If you're using Outlook, IE, or Netscape to write email, turn off the "HTML encoding." Those of us on Unix shells can't read it, and don't care enough to save the attachment and then view it with a web browser, since you're probably forwarding us a copy of the Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe anyway. VIII. Thou shalt respect thine neighbor's system. I know this is hard for a lot of you to grasp, but not everyone has a Windows machine. We also have UNIX boxes, Mac workstations, and Linux terminals. So, that really funny self-contained animation of the snowman eating the little boy won't run on them. So, if you have an .exe file to share, once again, place it on your page or server for download.   Look, as long as we can all get along, we can beat back the darkness of anachronism and take our people into a new age, where meaningful communication and true understanding can florish... hey... where are you going? Aawww... --Devin Pike