Oct 20 2008
Forwarding Warning or Alarming Emails
Over the weekend I got forwarded an email from a friend about a “BIG VIRUS COMING” and tried to use another website to prove that the virus was real (http://www.snopes.com/ which is a Urban Legends Reference Site to validate things or not).
My friend did two things wrong when forwarding this email.
1) She forwarded it to almost her entire address book, and put all these email address in the “To” line. Which means I can see all of these people and their email address and these other people see it to. Anyone can now email all these people.
I don’t know who these people are and don’t know that I want all of them to have my email address, but the choice has been taken away from me (if just one of these people is a spammer, I have just been signed up for another piece).
If you are going to forward an email to your address book, put all the names in the “BCC” field. BCC stands for Blind Cabon Copy, which means everyone is blind to the address it is sent to. People will still get the email, but they won’t be able to see any of the email addresses.
2) My friend claims she read the Snopes page to verify this, but she obviously only scanned it, because she missed at the bottom where it says:
“Readers should take particular care not to confuse the real postcard/greeting card virus with a number of virus-related hoaxes that have been circulating for several years. A variety of messages forwarded by well-intended people to warn others about the Postcard virus contribute to this confusion by including within them links to our article about the “Virtual Card for You” hoax”.
If you are going to forward an alarming email (or any news for the matter) make sure you have 100% verified it is real, don’t scan and do half a job on this. Some people don’t take alarming news well and they get upset, especially if they don’t know what to do about it.
