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Forwarding Dodgy Emails


AlanHo
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I have received today yet another Email from a well meaning friend that is dodgy and probably contains malware. I have therefore sent the following message to everyone in my contacts list to advise the less internet savvy that they need to be more careful.........................maybe you have friends that would benefit from the same advice.

I sometimes receive messages from friends and family that are forwarded with the best of intentions - but unbeknown to the sender, contain tracking malware. I hope that you will take time out to read the following information and act on the advice given.

By now, I suspect most people are familiar with snopes.com and/or truthorfiction.com for determining whether information received via email is just that: true/false or fact/fiction. Both are excellent sites and useful tools for determining whether an Email you have received is genuine or not.

The following is based upon information available on snopes.com and would seem to be very good advice :-

1) Any time you see an email that says "forward this on to '10' (or however many) of your friends", "sign this petition", or "you'll get bad luck" or "you'll get good luck" or "you'll see something funny on your screen after you send it" or whatever --- it almost always has an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails 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' email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other spammers. Even when you get emails that demand you send the email on if you're not ashamed of God/Jesus --- that is email tracking, and they are playing on our conscience. These people don't care how they get your email addresses - just as long as they get them. Also, emails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease "how would you feel if that was your child" --- email tracking. Ignore them and don't participate.

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 profitable purposes.

You can do your Friends and Family members a GREAT favour by sending this information to them. You will be providing a service to your friends. And you will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam emails in the future!

Do yourself a favour and STOP forwarding or adding your name(s) to those types of messages regardless how inviting they might sound, or make you feel guilty if you don't. It's all about getting email addresses and nothing more.

You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT!

Instead, you (and the friends you forward dodgy messages to), will by your action, be getting tons of junk mail later, very possibly with malware or a virus attached. Plus, we are helping the spammers get rich. Let's not make it easy for them.

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And then there are the bogus virus warnings, that "the most dangerous virus ever" will be coming, and that "Microsoft has confirmed it", and that you must "forward it to everyone in your address book".

Year after year after year these same things are coming around, and oftentimes it is the same people who sent it a few years earlier.

And very often these messages have accumulated hundreds of email addresses at the bottom; it sometimes appears to me that some people want to be spammed!

Excellently worded, Alan - I usually just reply "stop sending me this crap!".

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