Email Forwarding

If you receive a lot of "FW" (forwarded) email, you're probably tired of trying to decode the message. Some of these e-mails are loaded with so many >>>>>>>>>characters, it's just plain hard to read. Every > that you see in front of each line, means that it has been forwarded that many times.

Whenever you forward an e-mail by way of the "Forward" command, usually 2 things happen.

• Another one of those > characters gets inserted at the beginning of each line, and..........
  
  
  
• All of the "Sender's" information in the header of the original e-mail remains, along with any and all e-mail addresses. This is how a lot of "Spammers" get your e-mail address. By the time that e-mail reaches its final destination......... maybe in a year from now, you could be on quite a few "Spammer's" lists. Anyway........it looks much neater without all of those extra characters.

There are ways to remove the extra characters, either manually .... which can be painfully slow, or with the help of E-mail Stripper Programs. I prefer to use the latter method. I'll give you a link for a very good one, and it's "Freeware." What this program won't do, is take out the header information, this you will have to do manually. It's not hard, really.

When you want to forward a message, instead of using the "forward" menu or button, use "reply" instead. You will then have all of the original message, including the "header" information. To get rid of the original header information, just highlight the effected text and delete it.

By "Header Information" I'm talking about the information at the top of the e-mail composition box, not the From; To; or Subject Fields. The only things you would change here is the To: field, since you don't want to send the same message back to the original sender, and the Subject: field, where you should at least delete the Re: or Fw: preceding the subject

Once you've deleted the original header information, you can insert your own personalized information, which really only needs to be the recipient's name.

There are 2 ways to get the message into StripEm. You can highlight the whole message, or whatever part you want to clean up, or... in Outlook & Outlook Express you can click on the message in the top window, not preview window, and then click on the Edit menu and select Copy from the list, or use Ctrl key while pushing down the C key.

You then open StripEm, and click inside the white window and paste the "copied" message. Do this by holding down the Ctrl key while pushing down the V key.

Once you have the cleaned up text back in your outgoing message, you will probably have to do some formatting to really make it look good. By formatting, I mean that you may have to delete some empty spaces, because some of your sentences will most likely be broken up. You'll see what I mean.

This program does have a little shortcoming, in that it does not have a copy and paste command, but, that really is a minor problem. When you get familiar with using the shortcuts for copying and pasting, you will never go back to using the drop-down-menus for copying and pasting in any program.