For a long time now I have been warning folks that it is not a good practice to send your friends email in mass because of privacy concerns when you have several email address in the “To” field or in the “CC” field. Today I got an email from a friend of mine warning of another danger in distributing mass emails. Please read this email below and I hope you find it as eye opening as I did.
Please remember if you send this on to your fiends please put their email address in the “BCC” (blind carbon copy) field.
When emails say: “if I don’t get this back I’ll…. or, “See how many flowers you can get back”, or ” Forward this to 10 people in the next 5 minutes or something bad will happen to you”, etc., etc.
Advice from Snopes. com
1) Any time you see an E-Mail that says forward this on to ‘10′ of your friends, sign this petition, or you’ll get bad luck, good luck, or whatever, it almost always has an E-Mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and E-Mails of those folks you forward to. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of ‘active’ E-Mails to use in SPAM E-Mails, or sell to other spammers.
2) Almost all E-Mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards. All it was, and all any of this type of E-Mail is, is a way to get names and ‘cookie ‘ tracking information for telemarketers and spammers – - to validate active E-Mail accounts for their own profitable purposes.
You can do your friends and family members a GREAT favor by sending the information in this email to them; you will be providing a service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam E-Mails in the future!
If you have been sending out (FORWARDING) the above kinds of E-Mail, now you know why you get so much SPAM!
Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name(s) to those types of listings regardless how inviting they might sound! You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT in the long run. Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later! Plus, we are helping the spammers get rich!
Also: E-Mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other organization. To be acceptable, petitions must have a signed signature and full address of the person signing the petition.
