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Forwarding Emails Can Increase Spam/Viruses
Did you know that forwarding email messages could increase the amount of spam and virus-infected messages that your address receives?

A side effect of forwarding emails is that your email address is likely to be forwarded along with it. Once the message is sent from your computer to all of your friends, you have absolutely no control over how many times it gets forwarded and of course, how many times your private email address gets sent right along with it. Your email address will likely end up, not only in the private in-boxes of complete strangers, but also on mailing lists, news groups and other Web media (blogs, forums etc.).

With all of this forwarding, there is no doubt that your email address will cross the inbox of your not-so-friendly neighborhood spammer. Spammers just love emails that have been forwarded a number of times, as this gives them dozens of valid addresses to peddle their goods to.

Please note, this is not the only way that spammers get their recipients' email addresses, but it is a significant factor.

Not only will you receive an increasing amount of spam, but you will also receive more messages infected with viruses. Many new viruses use random email addresses found on the infected system to send to. So this means the message that you sent to Grandma Mary that she forwarded to her friend George, who sent it to his friend in Florida, who has a virus on his system, now has your email address on his system. When the virus scans their system, your address will be one that it sends to.

So the question is, what can you do to minimize the risk of private addresses from being added to a spammers list and receiving viruses from people you don't know?

First, you can make sure to remove any existing email addresses from the headers before forwarding the email. This will not stop your email address from being forwarded to people you don't know, but it will help the person that sent it to you and everyone else that they sent it to.

You could include a polite note at the top of the email asking that recipients "Help stop spam by removing email addresses before forwarding". This will remind and educate people about the issue -especially if the reminder stays intact and legible for subsequent forwardings.

Others methods to try is to copy the body of the email, and paste it to a new email. This takes a little more time the just clicking “Forward”, but it is the best way to remove previously-sent-to addresses. Also, if you are sending to multiple recipients, use the Blind Carbon Copy (bcc:) field of your email client to further protect your friends’ privacy.

December 8th, 2005
Power-Net does not support nor endorse these programs but have found some of them helpful. Many of the programs and links found on this page are for third-party applications and are to be used at your own risk. Should you encounter problems with the tools, you may need to consult a computer technician for further assistance.