To save some time and bother, I just wanted to thank my many admirers for the cards, gifts and flowers given to me on this Valentine’s Day. The delivery trucks started rolling in earlier this week, and right before I left for class today, I was almost side-swiped by a flower truck carrying my umpteenth delivery of roses. Really, how many dozens of roses does one girl deserve? It’s become almost absurd this year. So guys, remember for next year, money is just as good as flowers, and it fits better in my purse.

The subject of Valentine’s Day has already been greatly covered by my comrades at the Daily, so I’ll just drop it, even though having a column today would give me plenty of ammunition. Instead, today I would like to reach out to the students of Iowa State and beg them to listen to me.

I will not pretend to know everything about e-mail, and I know even less about the Internet. I know how to send mail and read it, but that is pretty much where it ends. But I do know a few rules of e-mail etiquette, and I also know many, many students on campus who don’t. Because of this, the majority of us are annoyed.

It’s called forwarded mail: mail sent from one person to another until you have to scroll through 200 lines of headings before you can get to the actual message. We have all gotten forwarded mail, many of us send it, and the majority of us hate it. It was common, my first year here, to receive ten forwarded messages a day from my other freshman friends. The redneck jokes, the obscene stories about the Brady Bunch, the chain letters that you just had to forward or your life would be turned upside-down and you’d be dateless till the year 2050, were always a treat to receive.

I was happy to send on whatever I received to my friends, even if it was lame. I had a folder just for forwarded mail that numbered into the triple digits. It didn’t bother me, basically because I was just glad to get any e-mail at all. But now that I’m a junior and almost too busy to breathe, I absolutely despise forwarded mail. I admit that I don’t receive it as much anymore, mostly because all my friends have sent all there is to send to me, but every once in a while I’ll get forwarded mail. But now instead of sending it on, I usually delete it. If I find it terribly amusing, I’ll send it, but I’ll try to delete all the heading stuff so the person I’m sending it to doesn’t have to scroll through a bunch of garbage to get to the point.

This year has been one of the biggest pains for e-mail users at Iowa State. Mass mailings have flooded servers and generally ticked-off everyone who has received them. Mass mailings are e-mails sent to large numbers of students by a single person. Last fall, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences sent out a mass mailing to all its graduate and undergraduate students informing them of the upcoming spring registration. Many of the students who received the e-mail didn’t even get to the actual message because they had to scroll past the e-mail addresses of 7,000 college students.

To make matters worse, pissed-off college students replied to the e-mail directly, which not only sent the same message back to the person who sent it, but everyone on the the mailing header. Students were receiving the same letter over and over again, eating up valuable disk storage space on the mail servers.

The same type of thing has occurred this semester, as many of you know, with an e-mail from someone excited about Chat Noir, a Web site on the Internet.

The ISU Computation Center has set up safeguards to keep this from happening. There is a formal policy against sending unsolicited e-mail to a large number of people. It may help stop mass mailing, but it won’t halt it all together.

In case you do receive another one of these “letter bombs” and feel you have to respond to it, check to see who wrote it on the “from-line” and respond to that person directly. This way, you won’t annoy everyone else, and the person who sent it will personally know you are unhappy (or whatever words you’d like to use).

Unfortunately, every student at Iowa State is allowed an e-mail address, educated or not about the “do’s” and “don’t’s” of e-mail. Hopefully, those who don’t won’t get hold of my e-mail address.

Leana Benson is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Madrid.