Junk mail and chain letters

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html
Many researchers new to the internet get "junk" e-mail all the time. And many times they will receive mail that has been forwarded to death warning of dire consequences from various diabolical viruses. BEFORE you decide to do all your friends a dubious favor and yourself be a contributor to junking up the internet and your friends' mailboxes, please take a minute to check Symantic's website describing virus hoaxes. Trust me, you are not going to get $800 from Microsoft no matter how much money Bill Gates gives away.

Remember, it's against the rules to 'warn' subscribers to the Denmark list of possible virus alerts by posting to the list. The servers at Rootsweb are monitored closely for viruses and they are cleaned up as soon as they are detected. It is also against the rules to forward to the list any kind of chain letter no matter how moving it may be. Doing so can result in immediately being unsubscribed.

Shouting

Another internet convention concerns the use of ALL CAPS when posting messages. Many people new to sending messages in e-mail are also new to "keyboarding." Because they may not be the greatest typists in the world (and many of us are not), some people think that typing in ALL CAPS is better because that way they don't have to worry about capitalization (or the lack of it). What they don't realize is that the use of ALL CAPS in the computer world is considered SHOUTING. The reason why makes sense if you think about it. Notice as you read this paragraph, the words typed in ALL CAPS tend to "jump" out at you with added emphasis. Early chat room users looked for various ways to add emotion to their virtual converstions. One way was the use of "emoticons." We have all seen these. Examples are :-) for a smile and :-P for sticking one's tongue out and ;-) for a wink. They also made extensive use of acronyms which made typing conversations faster (i.e. BTW for "by the way" and BRB for "be right back" and LOL for "laughing out loud"). Finally, the use of ALL CAPS came to mean the person was saying what was typed in all caps in a very loud voice. That is why when veteran internet users see a message typed completely in capital letters, they envision the writer shouting the message across the phone lines and we all dislike folks shouting at us. ;-) So the nice thing to do when posting messages is to take the time to make upper case and lower case letters and DON'T SHOUT!
 :-D <big grin>