AAGH! It’s spam!

Today I get crabby and fire off an email to several people, some of whom I don’t know, all of whom had forwarded the email that had enraged me.

Dear all

Please please don’t send on spam emails. But if you must, then to alleviate the problem of all sorts of people’s email addresses being traded back and forth to all sorts of people they have never met. USE BLIND COPY (bcc). Don’t leave the names of the recipients there for everyone to read. Look at the recipient list for this email. Do you see your name there? No. Neither can anyone else if it’s forwarded. Neat eh?

How do I know that it’s spam?

Emails with tales of teenagers with cancer who want everyone’s email system clogged up are SPAM. The clues that should alert you:

1. The forwarded email will be tracked so the “terminally ill young girl” (oh please!) can know how many people got them… Oh yeah? Suppose you wanted to send on an email and know how many people it was forwarded to along its life, which option would you use, which box would you tick, how would the info come back to you? You don’t know? You couldn’t do it? No. Neither can this lot. It’s a scam to make you keep sending the email out to clog up people’s systems.
2. It was sent by a “medical doctor”. A “medical” doctor? Wow! Brain cells please take immediate leave of absence. If it’s a ‘medical’ doctor, it must be completely above board and exactly what it says it is. How about let’s sack the “medical” doctor who has spent time sending out spam emails when s/he should be treating patients.
3. “Send to everyone you know” “Send to those you don’t know” “One guy sent it to 500 people”. Translation for anyone who needs it: “This is spam” “Clog up the emails of everyone you can think of” “Pity the poor sods in his address book!”
4. “The American Cancer Society will donate X cents per email sent”. Oh yeah? How’s that going to work given that a) there’s no way they can track them anyway and b) no legitimate organisation would ever raise money this way. Has anyone tried contacting them and asking. I haven’t, but I know what they’d say. They’d say essentially what I’ve said in 1 and 2 above.

IT’S A SCAM… IT’S SPAM…

THINK, PEOPLE, THINK!

Sorry to rant, but some of these things do damage. Most of us wouldn’t fall for this if it arrived by post or telephone. We must all have seen the TV programmes and newspaper stories exposing this stuff for what it is.

And if you still feel the need to send it on, USE BLIND COPY.

Oh and if you can’t do Blind Copy, DON’T SEND IT ON!

Rant over. If I’ve offended anyone, apologies, that wasn’t the intention. Please feel free to leave rude messages on my blog.

Penny

www.pennygrubb.com