Practicing the Black Art (03/08)
How To Forward Email
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@comcast.net
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Let’s examine a typical email scenario. After opening
your email, you find a message that you simply must share with all your
friends. You press the "Forward" button and one way or another get all
their email addresses in the "To:" box. Feeling quite satisfied after
pressing the "Send" button, you sit back and take satisfaction in the
joy you are sending to others.
You should be ashamed of yourself. You have just
exposed everyone on your mailing list plus any people who received the
email ahead of you to unending streams of spam, spyware, viruses, and
other assorted electronic junk and mischief that hackers are prone to
these days. What you have done is prove conclusively that you don’t have
a clue about the proper way to forward email. Your license to compute
should be revoked immediately.
As messages get forwarded in this way they move along
the internet, and the list of email addresses embedded in the note gets
longer and longer. All it takes is for just one of these folks to get a
virus or some other kind of malware, and everyone who has their email
address in that list can be infected.
Anyone can take those email addresses, sell them or
send out their own junk mail. Assuming you are a mature responsible
adult, you most likely would not want to harm anyone, even
inadvertently. What does a conscientious person do to stop or better
yet, prevent damage?
When you click the "Forward" button you enter the
edit mode of your email client. Before you do anything else DELETE all
the other email addresses appearing at the top of the message. Let me
repeat. DELETE them by highlighting them and THEN pressing the Delete
button on your keyboard. It doesn’t take long. When you’ve finished,
delete any other junk that isn’t actually part of the message, such as
information about the original sender. Delete anything that is not part
of what you want to send.
If you’re sending the message to more than one
person, do not use the To: or Cc: fields for adding email addresses.
Always, always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the
email addresses. The people receiving the message will see only their
own address.
Some email clients don’t automatically show the blind
carbon copy option. If that’s the case, click on where it says To: and
your address list will appear. Highlight the email address and choose
the BCC: option. It’s not much effort, and it eliminates the possibility
of someone using the email addresses inappropriately. When you send
using the blind carbon copy, everyone receiving the message will see
"Undisclosed Recipients" in the heading information.
If your email client requires that something be in
the To: field, send the message to yourself and use the BCC: field for
everyone else.
Remove any FW in the subject line. Better yet, clean
up the subject line completely by fixing any spelling or grammatical
mistakes. Why let someone else’s errors appear as your own?
Sometimes you will receive an email that is a
petition. It states a position and directs you to add your name,
address, and sometimes other information. Then you’re supposed to send
it to as many people as possible. If enough people do this, an email can
contain hundreds if not thousands of names and addresses.
The longer the list gets the more valuable it becomes
to a spammer or hacker because the names and email addresses are valid.
If you really want to support the idea behind the petition, a personal
letter to the eventual recipient carries a lot more weight than a piece
of paper with a long list of names. When you think about it, lists like
these can be generated from telephone books. Do you really think that a
member of congress is going to pay attention to something that could be
so easily faked?
Sometimes these petitions come with statements or
warnings that the emails are being traced. Don’t believe it. While
technology is constantly improving, there is still no way to trace
emails through the internet.
One kind of really annoying email is the one that
promises that something wonderful is going to happen, but only if I
forward the message to at least ten people in the next ten minutes.
However, if I fail to do so, some unspeakable evil will surely befall
me. I always fail to do so, and nothing bad has happened yet, but I
wonder if this could be the reason I haven’t won the lottery.
Before forwarding some version of an Amber Alert,
take a little time to check out the story behind the message. Most of
these messages have been circulating around the internet for years. Some
of them have been around for a decade. Almost all of them are much less
than they seem.
Some sites that will help:
www.hoaxbusters.com
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/a/current_netlore.htm
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/h-05.shtml
http://www.snopes.com/snopes.asp
http://www.vmyths.com/
You may not be able to stop this stuff on your own, but you can stop
contributing to it. :
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Copyright 2008. This article is from the March 2008 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL
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