FYI: Chain Mail Hoaxes~Update

by Glenn Littrell

For years I’ve been telling Internet users to stop forwarding ‘chain’ emails, finally an endorsement of this advice from SNOPES [courtesy of Mary C. Cook]:

Advice From Snopes

By now, I suspect everyone is familiar with www.snopes.com and/or www.truthorfiction.com for determining whether information received via email is just that:  true/false or fact/fiction. Both are excellent sites**. Below is their advice for us.

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 addresses 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, 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 this information 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! Let's stop making it easy for them!

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.

What to do if you do want to send information to others:   how to send information to your mailing list without exposing yourself or your mailing list.

So what do we do?  If you receive something forwarded to you it is my suggestion that you don't open it, don't forward it and you tell everyone on your mailing list to do the same. 

If you want to pass something along then:

1. create a new message

2. copy the text of what you want to pass along, not the addresses or "To" and "From" info.

3. paste it into the new message

4. put your address in the "To" field

5. put everyone else's address in the 'bcc' field, not the 'cc' field. 

This way the only address you share with your mailing list and the world is yours, the 'bcc' field hides everyone else's address.  Putting your email list in the bcc: field when forwarding doesn’t hide your email list because the tracker program is still in the ‘forwarded’ copy.

**additional fact checking sites are:

http://factcheck.org/
http://www.breakthechain.org/index.html 
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/ 
http://politifact.com/ 
http://www.about.com/ 

               gdl