If You Can Forward, You Can BCC

And you should!! Because in the first place, I don't want to get your quadruple forwarded email, but if I do, I don't want the 68,00 other people you forwarded it to to be able to see my PERSONAL, PRIVATE (I thought) email. Grrr. I have a junk account for that exact purpose. Maybe I should send out a mass email to everyone in my address book and tell them that if they have any forwards, spam, junk mail, etc to send me they ought to send it to said account. But of course, that would probably get forwarded again, thus defeating the purpose.

So instead I will tell you all about a neat little feature in your email account called the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC). This amazing (and amazingly simple) feature allows you to send out all the annoying forwarded emails you would like to everyone (everyone!) in your address book as if you were only sending it to one person. So everybody gets the email but they don't know that you also sent it to sexyman312@aol.com, moviemaven94@gmail.com, goth_gurl21@hotmail.com and all the other weirdos in your address book. They also don't have to scroll past all those names to get to the actual email you sent to see how naive you are. Granted, the way to access the BCC is different depending on which email service you use but generally it is found under the "To:" section where you type in the addresses of the people to whom you are sending your lame forward. I know it requires some brain power to figure out but if you can breathe on your own you should be able to get it.

And even if you are not a math genius you should be able to figure out that money isn't free. (Even if it comes from your parents, it wasn't free to them:) So if you get an email telling you that Microsoft will give you $250 for every person you forward an email to you should realize that it's too good to be true.

I am no math genius myself, but with the help of a calculator I was able to look into the economics of this proposition. (I think this math is correct, but if not don't leave me any snarky comments about my stupidity, thank you. I'm well aware.) Basically, for every 10 people you forward it to, you earn $2,500. That means that if 1,000 people forward it to 10 people each, they earn a collective 2.5 MILLION dollars. (Or Microsoft pays out 2.5 million dollars for every 1,000 people who forward it to 10 people, whichever makes more sense to you). The population of the US is around 300 million, but assuming that half of them (150 million) forward this email to 10 people each (this is where the math could get tricky, but remember that Microsoft is a global company so we're going to assume that each of those 150 million people could forward the email to people outside the US and not just to people in the US who would have already received it from somebody else) Microsoft would pay out 375 BILLION dollars!!!

Now you may think that Microsoft has that kind of money, but you would be wrong. In fact, they make about 60 billion dollars in revenue per year. A lot, yes. But still 6 times less than what they would have to pay to all those forwarders. It just doesn't make any economic sense.

I know most people hate math so here's an even simpler solution: snopes.com. This is an amazing website that will tell you all about folklore, urban legends, and the validity of forwarded emails. So if you get a forwarded email and you wonder if it's legit, all you have to do is go to their website and perform a simple search. (Just like google, and even if you can't do math I know you can do google.) There's pretty much nothing they haven't heard of and they will tell you with a big red sign if it's false (or a big green one if it's true).

But if you are too lazy or uninformed to do that, let me know when you get your check from Microsoft. I will have already gotten mine from the advertising company to whom I sold all the email addresses in your forward. HA HA!