chain emails (for beginners)

This shouldn't have to be said nowadays however it still happens...

If you receive an email asking you (for whatever reason) to send it to all you contact details, please don't. At best it's a spammers dream, at worst you may have infected your computer with malware.

Nowadays the blackhats are more sophisticated but this practice still goes on

 

Safe e-mail practice

Good advice, I get them all the time from "Friends" who think the message in the chain e-mail is "cute" or if they don't forward the chain letter, the sky will fall on them. I just delete them, usually without opening, (safest) and so far the sky has not fallen on me.

 

Thanks John,

But it's not just the jokes, the threats, the political message, the virus warnings... In fact it's none of that. I received such an email today and due to this I recieved all the senders contact email addresses and a fair amount of other people's who passed this on. Now those people need not worry about what I may do (I'm not malicous in any way) but now I have to worry about what other recipients may do (I have their address ergo they have mine).

I protect my email as much as I can

Primary, given willy nilly but only checked when expecting a response.

Secondary, used for people I have had eContact with and checked fairly regulary

Tertiary, used for people I have personal contact with and checked constantly.

Thankfully, it was one of the secondary emails that was compromised and I'll monitor traffic over the next month or two but I've a feeling that particular address will switch to primary

For anyone reading this, when you're gossiping on the phone to friends etc do you give out all your other friends phone numbers? I don't think so but when you fwd such an email to all that is in effect what you are doing.

 

Hi Steve ... I did that once ... I am a member of Pogo, and got flagged (warned) after receiving and email of such setting people straight that Bill Gates was NOT giving out free money to everyone that forwards this email. I asked people to please not send these mass e-mailings asking politely to stop, but becasue I replied to all on the list someone decided to report me saying that I was the spammer. That bothered me big time, because I'm such a pretty good girl ... patient and not a malicious person in the least. Although I don't have lots of time to play, I do enjoy the occasional R&R hanging out and meeting up with my cousin in Chicago. Now I just delete esp. on Pogo mail.

I've also had to resort to the tertiary email system. In my darlingdd email which used to be a main email, I get so much junk advertising and it's time consuming sorting through everything ... ABCing the emails helps greatly, because the one or two that are important I can separate out when necessary.

Ahhhh, the world of computing.