I am a fan of Bill Husted, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His technology columns are printed in the Rocky Mountain News on Mondays. I was reading some of his old columns online recently and found this one about sending mass e-mails to all 250 of your closest friends (everyone in your address book).
He makes two good points:
1. Before you send out the next joke or alleged virus warning (most of them are hoaxes, even if they say they've been confirmed on Snopes.com), ask the people you plan to send to if they REALLY want to receive this type of message. Most people really do NOT want to receive all that stuff, but they're too polite to tell you so.
2. If you insist on sending them, use the BCC option in your e-mail program. BCC means the recipient will only see their own e-mail address and not all the other addressess you've sent to. It's a privacy thing. If you're not familiar with the BCC option in your e-mail program, use that program's Help menu to learn how to use it.
I also received the following message in one of those mass e-mails:
Any time you see an e-mail that says "forward this on to 10 of your friends," "sign this petition, you'll get good luck (or bad luck if you don't!)," etc., 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.
I've checked it out with a couple of my geek friends and get varying answers as to its validity. But if it is true, just think how much spam you could avoid by NOT forwarding all those messages.
If you would like to check out Bill Husted's other columns,
click here to go to the archive website of his articles.