Save your company’s bandwidth and time
by Andrew Smith on 14/03/07 at 2:23 pm
4 comments
I was forwarded this great e-mail today, and it was one of the rare occassions that I was tempted to hit the Forward button and blast my whole address book. But I didn’t. That would be bad.
To whom it all concerns:
Just a word to the wise. E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Government or any other Municipality. To be acceptable petitions must have a signed signature and full address.
Almost all e-mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards. All it was, and all this type of e-mail is, is to get names and "cookie" tracking info for
tele-marketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own purposes.Any time you see an e-mail that says forward this on to "10" of your friends, sign this petition, or you’ll get good luck, or whatever, it has either an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to, or the host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of "active" e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to others that do.
Please forward this notice to others and you will be providing a good service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting 30,000 spam e-mails in the future.
(If you have been sending out the above kinds of email, now you know why you get so much spam!)
Check it out:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm
I’m not sure about the validity of all the technical stuff mentioned ("e-mail trackers" and "cooking tracking"), but the heart is good. I wonder what the cumulative effect of forwarded e-mails is to the world economy. Unfortunately there are millions of people joining the global internet community every day, so the saying "there’s a sucker born every minute" is true here. We won’t be able to stop forwarded e-mails completely, but you can politely reply to the next person who sends something to you, asking to not be included in future time-wasters bandwidth-hoggers mailings.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.
coda
Mar 14th, 2007
There’s always http://www.thanksno.com too, but personally I’d rather just hit “reply all” and embarrass the crap out of the sender so they never forward to me again.
Tiaan
Mar 14th, 2007
Someone needed the write this. Thanks!
Jon
Mar 15th, 2007
thanks!
Lisa
Mar 16th, 2007
you tell them….jeez i’m sick of those “send this to 20 people in the next 5 seconds or your g-string elastic will snap”!!