How you can help stop email fraud, viruses, and junk mail now!

This important information comes from a System Administrator of a large corporation. It is an excellent message that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send e-mails. Please read the short letter below, even if you're sure you already follow proper procedures!

Do you really know how to forward e-mails? Fifty percent of us DO and fifty percent of us DO NOT.

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it?

Every time you forward an e-mail there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses and names. As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for some poor sap to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every E-mail address that has come across his computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel!

How do you stop it? Well, there are several easy steps. Try the following if you haven't done it before:

(1) When you forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top). That's right, DELETE them! Highlight them and delete them, backspace them, cut them, whatever it is you know how to do. It only takes a second. You MUST click the "Forward" button first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and headers of the message. If you don't click on "Forward" first, you won't be able to edit the message at all.

(2) Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the To: or Cc: fields for adding e-mail addresses. Always use the BCC: (Blind Carbon Copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This is the way the people you send to will only see their own e-mail address. If you don't see your BCC: option click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that's it, it's that easy. When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say "Undisclosed Recipients in the "TO:" field of the people who receive it.

NOTE: The alternative to this is to use a NAME ONLY system, wherein others see the people's names but not their email addresses. (Not all email programs have it, but Apple MAIL does.). If you want the list to be anonymous, however, then the best way is by using the BCC.

(3) Remove any "FW:" in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix the spelling.

(4) ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual e-mail you are reading. Ever get those e-mails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual page you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open many e-mails just to see what you sent!

(5) Have you ever gotten an email that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10 or 15 people or your entire address book. The email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses.

A FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein. DO NOT put your email address on any petition. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient. Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and email address on a petition. Valid petitions can be signed on a form on the website of the organization creating the petition where the names go into a database, duplicates are deleted, and names cannot be accessed by the public. (Don't believe the emails that say that the email is being traced, it just ain't so!)

Some of the other emails you may want to think twice about passing along are:

1. The one that says something like, "Send this email to 10 people and you'll see something great run across your screen." Or sometimes they'll just tease you by saying 'something really cute will happen.' IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN--we're still seeing some of the same emails that we waited on 10 years ago!

2. Don't let the bad luck ones scare you either--you can trash 'em.

3. Before you forward an 'Amber Alert', or a 'Virus Alert', or some of the other emails floating around nowadays, check them out before you forward them. Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for YEARS!

Just about everything you receive in an email that is in question can be checked out at Snopes. Just go to www.snopes.com . It's really easy to find out if it's real or not. If it's not, please don't pass it on.

So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses.

Finally, here's an idea: You can email this blog post to your friends! (Just click on the email icon below). This is something that SHOULD be forwarded, so do it.