Posts filed under 'email'
We don’t want misinformation – so don’t forward it to us
One of my pet peeves is when people forward emails received from others without checking its content’s validity for themselves. This type of spam is known in the techie world as “viral,” because like a virus its survival depends on
- people passing the (mis)information on to others and
- the item being sent by friends the receiver trusts so that they assume that it has been checked personally by the sender.
A tiny fraction of the spam sent virally is well intentioned material (such as a request for prayers or monetary aid for a child’s operation) whose circulation has long exceeded its relevance.However, most scam or hoax letters divide themselves up into a number of standard types making it easy to check if they’re known scams. Examples of common types include heartstring pullers (a girl dying of cancer supposedly cares that an email mentioning the fact is sent to millions of strangers), moneymakers (“Bill Gates is tracking this letter and for every person it reaches through you he’s going to give you a whole lot of money”), or virus warnings (“a file may have already reached your computer – look to see if files named command.com and autoexec.com are there and if so immediately delete them” which cause you to damage your own computer).The purpose of these letters seem to be
- fooling you into believing you’re doing something nice or useful even though you’re bound to find out eventually and feel foolish
- embarassing you in front of your friends for urging them to pass the letter on to their friends
- giving some kind of twisted pleasure to some bored and often crude (a fake letter about a child with leukemia?!) people.
Call me unforgiving, but to me anyone who passes along an email that even sounds like it might be a forwarded email without checking its validity first is complicit in the spamming and/or scamming of the original composer. It takes a couple of minutes at most to check on a site such as
to see if the English language letter you’ve received is a scam or http://www.info.org.il/irrelevant/ for Hebrew hoaxes. Please do yourself a favor and bookmark at least one of these sites.Many of you are probably thinking “don’t get carried away – I’m sending a single letter which the receiver can decide in a few seconds to read or delete.” But remember that if you have as few as 10 people to send it on to (and most of us have more on our lists) and they each send it to ten who send it to ten – even if the letter just goes through 7 people each way (quite normal for email in the course of a day – more is likely – especially with forwarded mail) that’s already 10 million people you’ve spammed in a single day!! Furthermore because its coming from a friend’s personal email address it’s more likely they will take the time to read it lengthening the amount of time waste you’re personally responsible for. Surely you can take a couple of minutes to make sure the scammers don’t win and that you not only don’t waste your friends time but also don’t make them look bad in front of their friends to whom they pass it on. Please be responsible and not lazy – the world will thank you for it!
Add comment March 15, 2007
