FW: Don’t Forward This Email To Everyone You Know
One of the worst things out there on the Internet right now, as far as spam goes, is the circulation of email chains (also knows as “forwards”). This involves sending videos, stories, jokes, warnings, etc. to everyone in your address book by simply hitting the forward and including everyone in your inbox.
Have you recently received an email like this?
FW: Add Cell Phones to Do Not Call Registry
FW: SB-2099 – Bill Requiring Federal Tax on Guns
FW: Ericsson ‘Free Laptop’ Promotion
FW: Fourth-Grade Teacher’s Letter to Obama
FW: Barack Obama Is a Muslim
FW: Mr. Rogers Was a Marine Sniper / Navy Seal
I hate to break it to anyone who has stakes their lives on any of these being true, they’re not. They are hoaxes and often have particial truths but that are misconstrued to get peoples’ attention and have them forward the message to everyone in their email address book.
Why do these emails exist?
The short answer is simple: SPAM.
Take a look at the last email that you received and forwarded to someone else. Look at how many email addresses are in it. The last email forward I received had a grand total of fifty-three email addresses embedded in it.
David Emery, on UrbanLegends.About.Com, explains that the perpetuation of the misinformation in these type of emails are done because “it rouses people to action.” – David Emery, Urban Legends Guide
Making people scared, worried, concerned, or elated at the prospect of getting something free, gets people to hit that forward button and blast the email to everyone they know.
Sooner or later, this message is going to end up in the hands of someone who “harvests” email addresses to sell them to spammers. In fact, some of these email harvesters actually subscribe to newslists of jokes and inspirational stories, in order to guarantee that they’ll get the email forwards.
Why you may ask? Spammers don’t make money on the things people buy from spam emails, they make money on the number of successful emails that get send. So if a company selling some product pays a spammer to reach people, they will pay the spammer some pennies for each successful email receipt.
In other words, every time you send out one of those forwards, you are putting all of your friends’ email addresses (not to mention your own) into the hands of spammers. No wonder everyone is always perplexed at the amount of spam they get!
Furthermore, imagine this email message being sent to 25-100 people every time you or someone else forwards and copies your entire hotmail or yahoo address book. Then each of those individuals does the same. After a couple of rounds, the giant message is being delivered to thousands and thousands of email inboxes all over the world. As a one time email administrator, I can assure you that email servers don’t like these large messages, and they bog down the email delivery process.
What can you do?
There are a few things you can do. Either you should stop sending email forwards, or you should do the following:
- Look at the text of the email message. Are there email addresses in it? DELETE THEM ALL before you forward the email.
- When you forward the email, you should not put any addresses in either the “To” field or the “Carbon Copy” (CC) field. Every email address must go in the “Blind Carbon Copy” (BCC) field. This is the only way to guarrantee that your friends’ email addresses will be invisible to others.
Of course, that won’t prevent your email address from ending up in the hands of spammers, but at least it protects your friends.The next time, however, you do receive an message like this, reply to the sender and inform them about the problem of sending emails like this with all of the addresses visible. If you’re not comfortable with sending the message, at least point them to an article they can read about it and what they should do in the future. With more education on the part of Internet and email users we can all help curb the SPAM problem and make the Internet a better place.
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