Why you should use Google Docs instead of attachments for email forwards

I personally find email forwards quite annoying. They clutter your inbox with stuff you probably don't want and they most often than not expose your email address to a bunch of strangers (unless of course, the sender uses the BCC field). Besides, who wants all that pressure of having to resend it to all your contacts or you'll have 7 years of bad luck? Certainly not me.

Amazingly, people still find an uncanny need to exercise their right to spam. And I must confess than even I find myself doing it every once in a while. But when I do, I follow certain practices that make it less annoying and more useful:

• Do it very sporadically. If your readers really want to receive a weekly email on the latest funny videos, they can always subscribe to a mailing list, where they have control. The only way to control a trigger-happy spammer is to use filters, and no one wants to resort to filtering friends.
• Please, OH PLEASE, use Blind Carbon Copy. There are only a few cases when the BCC field is a must, and email forwards are definitely one of those. If you don't use BCC (and just paste a long list of emails in the TO or CC fields), you immediately expose your recipients addresses to spammers, hackers and crackers all over the world.
• And, something I discovered recently (and the topic of this post), use Google Docs instead of attaching files to the email. Why? I'm so glad you asked...

In addition to the obvious advantages of using Google Docs (such as real-time collaboration, online backup, universal access, etc), there is one final one that makes a compelling point when used for email forwards. To explain this final advantage, I must first elaborate a bit on what happens when you attach a file to an email.

You start with a file sitting on your computer (which you got from somewhere else, but lets assume you created it, for the sake of this example). You decide it is so awesome, you must share it with your family and friends, or maybe even the world (if you are tech savvy, this should immediately suggest collaboration, and hence, Google Docs, but read on anyhow). So, you write a short message, add all your recipients' addresses (in the BCC field!) and attach your file.

The first thing that happens is that your file is uploaded to your email provider server (be it Gmail, Yahoo Mail or your corporate email server), so that's copy number 2 of the original file. Then, when you click Send, a new copy of the file is created for each recipient (lets say you sent it to 30 people) and sent over to their email provider, to be stored there until it is retrieved. So, we already have 32 copies of the same file, sitting at various places around the World Wide Web.

But that's not all. When your recipients actually read the message and retrieve the file to view it, yet another copy is made, this time to download the file to the recipient's computer and open it to view it. Assuming all your recipients want to see what you sent, that means another 30 copies of the same file! We've already created 62 redundant copies of the file, and this has just begun. Every time one of your recipients believes what you sent is worth forwarding along, the process continues, creating copies of the same file over and over again. Once this begins, there's no stopping the storage waste chain reaction.

You may think its harmless, but how many people's desktops (and computers in general) are absolutely cluttered with downloaded files they received as attachments? So, on top of the monetary cost, there is also the waste of time cleaning up the mess all those downloaded files cause. And I haven't even touched the security issues (the file may be infected with a harmful virus which you are helping propagate!).

If instead of attaching the file (which, seriously, is so 1997) you opt to embrace cloud computing and upload your file to Google Docs, the story is very different. You only make ONE copy of the file, which is stored in Google's servers for anyone you share it with to see. Think of it as sending a link to YouTube instead of actually attaching the video as part of the message.

You can also do much more if you use Google Docs instead of attaching the file. Say you want to get names together for some poll. If you tell people to add their name to the message and resend, you never have the full list of names (think about it). Instead, you can create a public doc and tell people to add their name to that document, and THEN you have a full list of names (plus, you may do this very elegantly with Google Forms!).

I could keep rambling on all the advantages of using Google Docs and different things you can do with it, but I'm veering off track already. The point I wanted to make was that Google Docs is a much better alternative to sending attached files in general, but its kind of hard to not get carried away with all the other advantages it gives!

Update: As a smart reader pointed out, you cannot send blind invitations directly from Google Docs. You can, however, get the link to share (from the Share button) and paste that into a regular email, which you can then send with BCC. Of course, your document must be public for this to work, but only the people who know the URL will be able to see the document.