Advice from snopes

[Marigold2]

Subject: ADVICE FROM SNOPES - on "Sending e-mails"

ADVICE FROM SNOPES - on "Sending e-mails" (This very important information to read and share with your family and other email friends.) 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. Advice fromSnopes.com 1) Any time you see an E-Mail that says "Forward this on to 10 (or however many) of your friends, sign this petition, or you'll get bad luck, good luck, you'll see somethingfunny on your screen after you send it, 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-Mail addresses to use in SPAM E-Mails, orsellto other spammers. Even when you get emails that demand you send the email on "...if you're not ashamedof God/Jesus" that's E-mailtrackingand they're playing on your conscience. These people don't care how they get your email addresses - just as long as they get them. Also, emails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease- "How would you feel if that was your child..." - E-mail Tracking !Ignorethem anddon't participate! 2) Free greeting cards from family members are not what they seem. They are just another way they gather your addresses. They get two for each card sent and retrieved. 3) Almostall 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, 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 GREATfavor by sending this information to them. You will be providing a service to them, 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 muchSPAM! Do yourself a favor and STOPadding your name(s) to those types of listings regardless how inviting they might sound or make you feel guilty if you don't! It’s all about getting email addresses - nothing more! You may think you are supporting a worthy cause, but you are NOT! Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus attached! Plus, we are helping the spammers get rich! Let's don't make it easy for them! Also: E-Mailpetitions are NOTacceptable to Congress or any other organization - i.e. social security, etc.. To be acceptableand legal, apetition must have a signed signature and full address of the person signing the petition. So, this is a waste of your time and you're just helping the Email trackers.

(Please copy and paste this as a new email and tell them to do the same and send this to all of your email friends and help stamp out SPAM.)




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[Laura's Babies]

I have, for YEARS asked people NOT to send me forwards or to include me in mass emails, passing my email address along to EVERYBODY and you always have those few that will just NOT LISTEN! They may stop for awhile, then start all over again.. Grrrr!

[Barbara]

This is very interesting and makes sense. I never continued these forward chains as I just do not like to be blackmailed (as in "to people who broke the chain, an accident happened" or the like but now I know even more about it.

[moosmom]

Have no fear, I never, EVER open any email that I don't recognize. If the sender is sincere, and wants me to know something bad enough, they will call me. Plain and simple. This has always worked for me. Doesn't hurt to have Norton Anti-Virus either.

[Medusa]

I've been saying this seemingly forever but now that Snopes is saying it, maybe people will listen. The paragraph concerning online petitions is especially important b/c I get them all the time regarding animals and animal cruelty. When I tell people that I've not seen them make a difference, I'm always answered with "Well, we have to try". No. We don't. They're a waste of time and energy and they could be damaging to our computers and tracking our moves.

[Freedom]

I never forward those chain messages, and have asked folks not to send them to me. I just sent this message out on my email list to all those who continue to send me that type message.

Only thing I am not sure about -- I use the free greeting cards from 123greetings and blue mountain, I don't like that I can't use them!!!

[Marigold2]

I have two friends who keep sending me these. Both are very devote and they send me all these prayers. It is lovely to have someone pray for me but they just don't seem to get the fact that the money angel is bad and that if I don't forward her in 10 minutes I am going to have bad luck.

[Catlady711]

Quick word of advice...

Just because something arrives in your inbox with the words 'Snopes approved' or 'found this on Snopes', ALWAYS CHECK IT OUT YOURSELF FIRST anyways before sending it on!!

I have seen lots of things that were hoaxes and untruths being forwarded saying 'Snopes approved', even going so far as to include the link to Snopes. All in effort to get you to happily forward stuff along knowing you won't actually check it out first because it has Snopes name on it.

The email at the top of this thread is just another of those.

There is no email tracking program that is sending your email to spammers or telemarketers every time you forward. And Snopes has never said that Congress will not accept email pettitions (although they are a huge waste of time).

Check these real links yourself on Snopes if you don't believe me.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/false.asp
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.asp

And two more good ones on the whole 'email tracking' hoaxes...

http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/fakegiveaways.php
Tracing all recipients of an e-mail message is not yet technically possible, and even if it were, Bill Gates certainly wouldn't be testing software that performed such tracking by blindly sending messages out to the Internet with a promise of financial reward to the recipients.

First and foremost, e-mail tracking programs do not exist. That folks continue to fall for myriad varieties of these leg-pulls is in part attributable to netizens having caught so many references to these non-existent programs that the new hoax is able to continue building on an already partially-constructed platform of belief.

(As with every other technological issue, the statement "e-mail tracking programs do not exist" becomes less and less true every day. It is possible in some cases to determine who has read a particular mail message, but there is no method of doing so that will work with all the myriad of e-mail programs out there or keep track of who forwarded the message to whom.)

Once again, e-mail tracing programs do not exist.


http://urbanlegends.about.com/librar...y/aa081298.htm
Like all chain letters, this one is a tiresome waste of time and bandwidth, etc., etc., but it's also a noteworthy iteration of a persistent Netlore motif known as "email tracking" — in this context the supposed capacity, using special software, to monitor the path of any message through multiple forwards by an ever-increasing number of senders to an ever-increasing number of recipients.

As of this writing, no such software exists. (Granted, the use of HTML and Java in email makes tracking of a limited sort possible, but they are not universally used, hence it remains impossible to track the circulation of a chain email from beginning to end.) It is, however, a handy fiction for Net pranksters, who rely on "social engineering" to dupe users into replicating their handiwork.

[Catlady711]

Oh as an added bit of humor to send to your friends who keep insisting on forwarding stuff to you....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BlZi5rOcZQ

[Cataholic]

This is very funny! A post about the hoax of snopes and email tracking that is a hoax itself!

[sparks19]

I had wondered if it was a hoax but I don't really know how to use snopes LOL

but my sister and father are ones that continually forward on CRAP ... everything they get they forward SO... I get it TWICE lol. but they just won't stop sending it so now I just automatically delete them without looking

At least my mom only forwards me things she knows I will find funny

[Catlady711]

I don't really know how to use snopes LOL

You just go to the site, click the top 25 hoaxes and that will give you the list of the most current circulating hoaxes. That usually covers alot of the emails you'll get.

If that doesn't, just type in a few key words from the email into the search box in the upper right corner of the page. That will give you a list that is likely to have the email you're looking for. Key words that work best are names of people, places, or businesses from the email you're looking up.

[Catty1]

I type a few key words from the email into my search engine (Google) and click on the search....and that turns up a lot, too!