Please pass on this information to your email contacts

Here is something everyone should read. Particularly for those who send out lots of emails to friends. If you don't, you may be hurting yourself and your email contacts.

Please read to the end.

By now, I suspect everyone is familiar with www.snopes.com and/orwww.hoax-slayer.com or www.truthorfiction.com for determining whether information received via email is just that: true/false or fact/fiction. All three are excellent sites.

Advice from Snopes.com -- Very important!

1) Any time you see an email that says forward this to '10' of your friends, sign this petition or you'll get bad luck or good luck, you'll see something funny on your screen after you sent it. It almost always has an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward the mail to!

The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then it is able to get lists of 'active' email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other spammers. Even when you get emails that tells you to send the email on if you're not ashamed of God/Jesus .... that's email tracking! They're playing on our 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' .......they are all email tracking!!! Ignore them! Don't participate!

2) Almost all emails 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 that was to get names and 'cookie' tracking information for telemarketers and spammers - to validate active email accounts for their own profitable purposes.

You can do your friends and family members a GREAT favor by sending this information to them; you will be providing a service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam emails in future!

If you have been sending out (ie. FORWARDING) the above kinds of email, now you know why you get so much SPAM!

Do yourself a favour and STOP adding 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! One email doing the rounds for the third time is the whales being killed on a beach in Denmark. Email address of every one who forwarded that are now with the spammers!

You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause - YOU ARE NOT! Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus attached! Plus, you are helping the spammers get rich!!

Also, email petitions are NOT acceptable to the White House, Congress, UNESCO, UNICEF or any such organizations. To be acceptable, petitions must have a signed signature and full address of the person signing the petition. So this is a waste of time and you're just helping the email trackers.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, DON'T FORGET TO:

1. DELETE other people’s email addresses BEFORE forwarding emails that you receive.

2. When forwarding/sending email, send as b.c.c. so that the other receipients' email addresses cannot be seen or tracked.