Fwd: A thing or two about forwarded emails
March 30, 2009 at 13:23 6 comments
When I check my email everyday, I tend to at least see one email that is forwarded to me by somebody. It could be something nice, like a list of really cute stuff, or life philosophies. It could sometimes be outright freaky, like some doctored photos of a girl that eats human, or some freak accident. Some are sympathetic mails, “Please forward to as many people as possible, because every time it is forwarded, donation of x amount of money will go towards saving this dying child/person”. Some forwarded mails are about things that you should be aware of, like health, and some Windows hole that could let hackers destroy your zero sector, therefore, render your hard drive useless. Some… are just non-sense threat, “If you do not forward to at least 10 people, you will have bad luck for a day”.
Sound familiar?
I’m not surprised. Forwarded mail now are about just as common as spam; the only differences being that spam gets filtered out 99% of the time, while forwarded mails… just sometimes and while most people delete spam on sight, some do read forwarded mails, and forwards them.
The truth is…
But do you know that forwarded mail leads to getting spammed? The truth is, forwarded emails is a tool employed by spammers to collect email addresses. Not convinced? Open up a few random forwarded emails and write down all the addresses you see that was before yours. You’d be surprised that you could collect a few hundred from just one or two emails. I even went as far as to do an experiment of this with a few of my friends. We just created a new account with gmail, sent a forwarded mail to 10 people, and wait to see how long it reaches our own mailboxes. The return period varied, but all of us eventually got the mail that we initially sent through from that gmail account. After tallying our results and removing duplicates, we collected almost 1,000 unique addresses in a span of about 1 month. This method of collecting email addresses might be slow, but it remains one of the easiest, and costs the least effort. Now multiply by the numbers of variants that is now floating all over the Internet. The numbers could run in the millions for all we know.
What we can do
Coming to the sense of it, we all hate spam, but ironically, sometimes we bring it onto ourselves by falling for a spammer’s bait: forwarding emails. Call me cold-blooded, but I think we should all just stop forwarding emails to reduce the chance of getting spammed. If you really must forward some email, don’t be lazy, delete the preceding addresses and sent it using the BCC function (BCC = blank carbon copy, which means the recipients only see their own address). It takes collective effort to stop spammers. One less source of email addresses is one less chance people will get spammed.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: forwarded email, spam.
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Kazuki Presents~! 
1.
蠅軍曹 | March 30, 2009 at 14:26
About 80% of the forwarded facts I received are hoax. I refuted each of those since about 3 years ago, with references from snopes.com, about.com and so on… I offended some people in the process because I used to reply the mail to all recipients.
Now I got less than 7 forwarded mails per week
2.
Kazuki | March 30, 2009 at 14:31
LOL
3.
NoFunJoe | May 10, 2009 at 02:59
I was (am still) doing the same thing, the result is people knew it’s no fun to include you, so — you’re excused from the loop, about 95% will keep silent and just ignore you,(more likely still doing same thing because reply all, forward AMAP is easy and fun)
3% appreciate/acknowledge your feedback, 2% disagree/debate with you. but since most offended keep silent, I’ll never know how many read beyond my reply and change their way of emailing.
ps: I do know 2 cases which they didn’t abandon me and use bcc ever since, my comment only back to sender, so less chance get offended. I think we need to carefully choose the wording to deliver the good will.
4.
Kazuki | May 10, 2009 at 12:37
Good point. I’ve never tried to reply their mail to tell them how these forwarded email could contribute to spamming. Most of the people who forwards mail to be are people whom I know and get to meet personally so I usually tell them face to face.
5.
NoFunJoe | May 13, 2009 at 06:03
For most part of hoax emails, reply and cited the factual reference is easier for F&F hard to meet face to face. Some of those urban legends mislead could do more harm than spam, I feel obligate to tell them look beyond the text, sometimes quoted the partial true and highlight the meaningful true it purposely skipped/transplanted.
6.
Kazuki | May 13, 2009 at 08:44
Wow… now that’s what I call a responsible citizen. I’ve never given a thought about it in that way. Most, if not all, of the time, when I see an FWD appended to a mail and I do not expect it, I’ll first read the subject. As long as the subject looks like spam / hoax / etc., I’ll just delete them and try to “educate” them about this fact. Well, I do not know if they do indeed stop completely, but it works for me.
That is a very very good idea and one that helps a lot, but sadly I’ve seldom done that. I think I would do that from this point onwards. Thanks for the pointer. =)