Periodically I receive emails that tell me to read them and forward them on to many people. They usually include phrases like, “Please forward this warning to all your friends, family and contacts” or “Big Virus coming – Read and Forward.” Many of these emails also say things like “I checked on snopes.com” or “I checked on hoaxbusters.” Or some other statement to provide some supposed validation.
Almost all of them contain many email addresses from the all the previous times the message has been forwarded. And all of them are meaningless — or worse.
A Good Tool For Spammers
These types of emails are an excellent tool for spammers to harvest loads of email addresses. The reality is there are new viruses and spyware scams being released on the Internet on a daily basis. Sending out an email to a group of people about a single virus does no good. Especially if they haven’t kept their Internet Security software up to date.
One suggestion with emails like these – if you want to forward them on – is to do so by copying the text from the original message and pasting it into the body of a new email as plain or ASCII text. On many occasions, emails like these can include HTML code or hidden scripts that harvest all the email addresses people have added and send them off to a spam server. As the email and all the addresses you see listed gets forwarded, the spammers get more and more addresses to send spam to. For more information on copying text as plain or ASCII text see the earlier post on “Copying Text from a Web Page”
It isn’t a 100% certainty that every email that’s been forwarded to multiple groups of people is malicious. However, this is a known trick that spammers use. A suggestion: instead of forwarding warning messages on viruses a better suggestion is to remind people you know to use a quality antivirus/antispyware/firewall and spam blocking solution. And to keep it up to date. And to run regular scans.
Another similar situation is an email that is a petition from some group that you aren’t real familiar with or has been forwarded from a few different people already before reaching you. The general format here is that the email will state some position and ask you to add your name and address and to forward it to some number of people or even your entire address book. Once again the email can be forwarded on and on and on while collecting hundreds or thousands of names and email addresses.
This type of email may well be another spammer ploy. In reality the completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the number of valid names and email addresses in the email. A safer route if you want to support the petition is to send your own personal letter to the intended recipients of the petition.
Think Twice Before Forwarding – Use Plain Text If You Must
There are many other scams for gathering email addresses and corresponding names. They all lead to more spam, more Internet congestion, and increased costs for everyone. Next time you receive an email similar to those described above think twice before you forward it. And if you must forward it, copy the text as plain or ASCII text and past it into the body of your new email.