Advice from snopes

**moosmom** · 01-20-2010, 07:39 AM

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** · 01-20-2010, 08:22 AM

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** · 01-20-2010, 09:58 AM

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** · 01-20-2010, 07:12 PM

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** · 01-20-2010, 08:15 PM

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.