“Fwd”, three dreaded letters that herald the most unwelcome means of com-
munication: A forwarded email. For a long time, my inbuilt rule of the inbox
was that any email containing these letters in the title would be automatically
sent to trash. Sometimes though, work documents had to be salvaged from
the virtual trash bit because some client or associate forgot to change the title
of the email forwarded and which usually contained attached documents.
Later, with the novelty of forwarding email decreasing, people went back to
the laborious task of writing their own mail instead of sending a prepackaged
joke that has been transmitted to someone who received it from someone else
and so the version that would get across my own inbox would have at least
several >>>> before every broken sentence.
Well, I am extremely secretive about my email list ever since I sent every-
one some message while quoting everyone in the “to” field only to discover
that there has been subsequently a lot of side talk among the recipients since
someone decided to email “everyone” back with a controversial answer. The
episode taught me to conceal the people the email was being addressed to
under the “bcc” (blind-carbon-copy) with only my own email showing on the
recipients’ “to” field.
Luckily, other people are more extroverted about their contacts. And so
whenever I still get the odd forward, one of the most thrilling moment is not
the message in itself which is usually an appeal for some cancer-inflicted girl
who is eminently due to die but has been lingering throughout the internet
for quite a few years, and will most likely outlive us all; but rather finding
who the message has been sent from, sent to, and who were the previous and
current addressees.
Going through lists of endless email addresses, trying to build the story –
not only of the people behind the email – but of the link that bonds them
all to some initial person who instigated the email. What would such and
such persons from an investment company be present with other aliases and
nicknames, why would certain emails beginning with “doc” cohabitate with
some more openly sexual ones with “hottie” somewhere prior or after the
underscore, what is the obvious link between the go-getters working for large
multinationals and the more mundane nameandfamilyname@yahoo....
I is not uncommon for me to run certain emails on search engines, or to go to
the websites of some of the companies whose employees figured on the list,
or check the MSN or yahoo profile of some of the culprits.

The links between the individuals start getting woven at times, or at others
remain completely elusive, leaving much work for imagination to break free
trying to rationalize the social ties between individuals who – perhaps – have
just added each other on some messenger list, or who knit together, or swing
together, or are both fans of some long-unremembered sixties star, or are
simply members of the same household who take turns at using the computer.
Fwd has suddenly reemerged in the titles of the emails I have been getting,
most of which are petitions, cries of help, and invitations for voting on CNN
to back the Lebanese cause, bank account numbers for donations, and the lat-
est political news of the day from a concerned friend. But the thrill remains
that of investigating the virtual company I find myself with, emails rubbing
against one another, separated with mere commas, while real lives are miles
apart and bank accounts await donations, and little girls refuse to die from
cancer.