Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Email forwarding – All Fun and No Responsibility ?

I normally don’t participate in email forwarding but do at times get forwarded mails, most of those being jokes that circulate on net. At times I also get some mails that tend to increase (or spoil, if you read ahead) your knowledge.

One of such forwards was a mail that informed that if you ever get into a situation that you are at gunpoint of a robber demanding you to withdraw amount from ATM, you should obey him with an exception that instead of passing correct PIN should key in the reverse on i.e. if it’s 1234 you should key in 4321. The ATM would work seamless and would allow you the money but at the same time alarm the nearest police station of the probable robbery.

Isn’t that great? It is, except that it is not at all correct. I myself thought of forwarding it to others, but decided to research and thus ended up knowing that it was a proposal in some countries and that it was never sanctioned or implemented.

A recent mail that I received informed that mars would be closest on August 27th and would be seen with bare eyes somewhere at midnight. The claim that no one alive today would be able to see it happening again raised my eagerness to see it. Thanks to my habit of researching that I came to know beforehand that the event already happened in 2003 and the email forward was an old one that’s still circulating omitting the year from date.

A large number of emails with false information are circulated without confirming the truth. Is email forwarding all fun and no responsibility? If each one receiving similar forwards checks for correctness himself before sending it ahead, not only the chain will break well ahead, that will also discourage people from originating such mails.

How to do that?

Whenever you get an email with information that you feel like forwarding, open up google and pass a text portion from the mail or the subject or a few keywords and the results can in a large extent tell you if the info is fake or not. Like for example, if for above cases you search for PIN NUMBER REVERSAL (the mail subject) or August 27 Mars (kewords from mail) the first few entries would be enough to point the mails to be fake ones.

urbanlegends.about.com and snopes.com are two of the sites that have a large collection of such mails and the explanations on them.

Though not all such mails can be traced to prove them fake in this way, but at least spammers could be stopped from fooling people in believing their words. Just visit the above sites and you will get to know how Bill Gates is giving away his fortunes and how Nokia is competing by giving away it’s latest LAPTOPs for free!

One of the problems with mail forwards is they are spammer’s heaven. Want to collect mail addresses to send spam? You just need to collect as many forwards as you can, and run email extractor software through them and get away with thousands of mail addresses thanks to the irresponsible email forwarders.

Avoid being one such forwarder who exposes other’s email addresses. If you are using an offline email client as “Outlook” put all email addresses into BCC field and keep To or CC fields empty. The same should apply to webmail services too but if your webmail provider insist on keeping at least one address in TO field then keep your’s there and others in BCC.

Act responsibly and enjoy email forwarding.