«Chain-Letter Emails»

Ok, we all know (I hope) that noting bad will happen if you don't forward these to everyone in your address book. We also know (again, I hope) that nothing good will happen to you, either. That is to say these chain-letter emails have absolutely no power or influence over your luck, health, love life, finances or otherwise. So why send them? Is it that they are mildly amusing to you? Or is it that you received this annoying piece of crap and had to inflict it upon others?

Putting aside the fact they are annoying for a moment, there is a tangible downside to these. It's called spam. You see, each person these are sent to gets their email address tacked on to the message. Somewhere down the line this will get sent to someone that runs a spambot. They will extract the email addresses from the To:, Fw:, Cc:, and From: fields (and any list that spilled into the body of the message) and enter those into his little spambot and share (or sell) the list with all his spambot friends. Next thing you know, everyone the chain-letter email has ever been sent to is getting a lot more spam in their inbox.

The same thing happens to any email that keeps getting forwarded and sent around like those cute little joke emails. Oh, you know the type. They usually are filled to the brim with lame jokes and animated gif images.

So please, do everyone a favor and stop forwarding such things. But if you absolutely must send an email to multiple people, please use the bcc: field instead of the Cc: field. At least that way you won't send everyone the entire list of emails.