Pass This On To Someone You Love
September 5, 2008 by John Boyd
Filed under Interesting
How many times have you seen that in the subject line of an email from your sister, brother or your parents. Or something like, “Send this to 10 people you love and you’re assured good luck for the rest of the day”.
1) Any time you see an email that says forward this on to ‘10′ of your friends, sign this petition, or you’ll get bad luck, or whatever, it has either an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of ‘active’ emails to use in SPAM emails, or sell to others that do.
2) Almost all emails 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 email is, is a way to get names and ‘cookie’ tracking information for telemarketers and spammers - - to validate active email accounts for their own purposes.
You can do your friends and family members a GREAT favor by sending this information to them; you will be providing a service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam emails in the future!
If you have been sending out (FORWARDING) the above kinds of email, now you know why you get so much SPAM!
Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name to those type listings regardless how inviting they might sound!
You 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 in life! And so will your friends and family.
Also: Email 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.
You may also want to contact whoever you have your internet plan with (cable or telecom) and ask them about spam filters. Most email clients have spam filters built in to them, but most people don’t take the time to keep them up to day. I have mine searching key words, if it sees that word in the subject line or body content of an email from somebody who is not on my safe sender list, it is automatically deleted. That way, I never have to see it.
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