Do you send or receive “Friend Spam”?
RE: Sending out “clever shit” to everyone in your email address book. Senders and receivers alike, please read this!
It is a common thing these days, someone has a big list of friends in
his email address book AND he has earned the appellation – “finder of cool
things online”. So he finds a funny joke, a meaningful self help item, a
patriotic call to arms or (heaven forbid) some propaganda for his chosen
religion.
Just Tell Your Friends NO to Chain Email! – And Here's The Reason Why.
- Let’s say there are 80 addresses in his Outlook Express address book
- Eighty people receive the great joke he just sent – and just half send it along to one friend
- He has just put 3280 email addresses on 120 other computers of unknown security status
- Ten of his friends add their entire address book of 50 addresses each and send it on without deleting the addresses already in the email header
10 x 50 x 130 (his 80 + their 50) = 65,000 total email addresses planted on unknown computers
Add that to the total from his 40 other friends, 3200 -
Grand total – sixty eight thousand, two hundred eighty (68,280) email addresses casually peppered across six hundred and twenty computers! From one email blast!
In one seemingly innocent act, he has engineered 68,200 compromised email addresses (not all unique, of course). What is the probability of all the computers they are now stored on having airtight internet security??
What if you have five other friends including you in their weekly broadcasts? Can you imagine how many computers your email address is sitting on right now? This is a leading source of spam lists. Not just the spam, you end up getting the same shit from all of them sooner or later.
One last time - spam is spam is spam, whether it comes from your friends or the web site you just bought a jacket from or from out of the blue, it's still spam. If your friends get ticked off at your attempts to secure your privacy - ask yourself; "how good a friend is he or she?"I believe two things to be true
1. Most of the perpetrators are unaware of the potential harm to their friends. Excluding cases of obnoxious self promotion, it is usually an innocent act, and not considered by them as spam.
2. Most recipients are totally oblivious of the huge breach of their privacy!Bot Nets – watch this short video while thinking of how many computers your personal or business email address is on right now!
“Some viruses & worms spread by emailing themselves to all the email addresses they can find in the email address book.
As some people forward jokes and other material by email to their friends, putting their friends’ email addresses on either the To: or Cc: fields, rather than the BCc: field, some viruses and warms scan the mail folders for email addresses that are not in the address book, in hope to hit addresses of the computer owner’s friends’ friends, friends’ friends’ friends, etcIf it wasn’t already done, it’s just a matter of time before such malware will not only spam copies of itself, but also send the extracted list of email addresses to it’s creator..”
RESPECT YOUR FRIENDS - A GOLDEN RULE:
As invisible email addresses can’t be harvested, it’s good advice to have the email addresses of recipients of jokes & the like on BCC:, and if forwarded from somebody else remove from the email’s body all the email addresses inserted by the previous sender.Soon, social networking will also go the way of email – spammed to worthless status! Do you get “invites” from people you never heard of?
Can’t find your own posts on Facebook because every friend of every friend of every friend of yours has buried them with pictures of their new dog? Well, if your posts are buried to you, they are buried to everyone else as well. What then is the value of this network?