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- Why are we
receiving so many SPAM
everyday?
- How could the spammer knows your
email address?
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Most of us often receive a lot of
email forwarded by our
friends which they feel so cool or so important that they
couldn’t resist it to
share it with everybody they know. We open the email and then we have
been
infected with the same diseases. We also think that the email is so
cool or so
important and we really think that we have the responsibility
to forward it to
other people. We click forward button and fill in as many address as
possible
as recipient in the hope for them to be so please and happy reading
that
particular email.
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BUT…
Did
you know that each time you forward the "I
think
this is cool" email to your friends, you a increasing the risk for
your
email address to be targeted
by spammer in the future? Not only your email, you
are also risking your friend's email address too.
How…???
Imagine
if you already forwarded an email to 10 of your
friends. That means your email address will be exposed to 10 peoples.
"Those are my
friends… So what? They already know my email address"
The
"excitement"
comes in the later part. If all 10
of your friends forward the same email to their friends, your email
address will
likely be forwarded along with it. Hey, another 100
people will know your email
address!
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Imagine if you
already
forwarded an email to 10 of your
friends. That means your email address will be exposed to 10 peoples.
"Those are my
friends… So what? They already know my email address"
The "excitement"
comes in the later part. If all 10
of your friends forward the same email to their friends, your email
address will
likely be forwarded along with it. Hey, another 100
people will know your email
address!
Like
pyramid scheme, the number grows bigger and bigger.
Sooner than you can imagine, your email address has been exposed to the
Rest Of
The World. Your email address is likely to end up, not only in the
private
in-boxes of complete strangers, but also on mailing lists, news groups,
online
forums and the hard copy someone printed off to show to their uncles
and unties.
Sooner or later, it is possible, even probable, that your email address
will
cross the in-box of your friendly neighborhood spammer. Spammers must
love
emails that have been forwarded a number of times. For them, the dozens
of
valid addresses that such emails have collected upon their journey
through
cyberspace must seem an enticing bonus.
So, what
can you do to minimize the risk of being added to a
spammers list via this method?
- Stop
forwarding emails. (**Impossible.
Easier to be said
than to be done.)
- Remove
any existing email addresses from the headers before
forwarding the email.
- Use
'BCC' instead of 'TO' or 'CC' whenever you forward and
email. This will make sure the email address of your friend will be
kept
unexposed.
- Kindly
remind all your friends to put your email address in BCC
column when sending "I think this is cool" type of email next time.
- Kindly
ask all recipients to remove your email address from the
mail body and header prior to re-forwarding the email to their friends
Although
the above steps could not fully prevent spammers from knowing your
email address (there are a lot of other ways for them). It
will help reducing the risk. This method is the best to use if your
email address still new. An email address that had already bombarded
with SPAMs will not make any difference as the spammers already knows
your email address. In this case, only your service provider could help
you by implementing spam filter on the email server.
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