The Annoying Chain-Letters...

Second day… Second post… Not bad…

I was thinking about a subject to write today and then I received an e-mail with just the thing… SPAM.

I understand that all of you that cooperate with chain-letters have good intentions, but you’re being abused the moment you click send or forward, and worse than that you are abusing your friends by doing so.

Chain-letters have one purpose and one purpose only!! To collect YOUR email address along with your friend’s!!!

When you receive an email asking you to resend it to all your friends you should STOP and THINK. The odds are it’s SPAM.

Most chain-letters use the name of known companies to add credibility to it, usually big software companies, foundations, NGOs or any other major company.

It only takes you a minute or two to check the chain-letter, there are sites that monitor this chain-letters, in some cases companies or foundations that are referred in chain-letters publish in there website an announcement stating that they DO NOT support it. Or simply google it, I’m sure that you will find websites with some information about this potential chain-letters you’ve received.

Check these websites to see if the email you’ve receive is a know chain-letter:

http://www.breakthechain.org/

http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/chain-letters.html

Don’t believe every think you read on your e-mail!! It’s soo ease to write an e-mail, that anyone can do it and start a chain-letter, some do it for fun, others (the majority) do it to grab email addresses, so that they can sell them to spammers and advertising companies. Ever wondered how did that advertising mail you’ve got yesterday ended up in your email box?? There you go…

The main thing is to use a thing called BRAIN!! You know, the thing you got inside your head, that’s for a thing called “THINKING”!!

Do you actually think that NOKIA or SAMSUNG will give you a cell phone if you send that email for 30 friends?? Their business is to sell phones, not give them away!!

And MSN is not going to cancel you account if you fail to send that email to 18 of your contacts. And the MSN icon will not turn blue when you send the email to those contacts, simply because it’s blue already!!

The same way, Hotmail will not cancel you email account if you don’t send the email, simply because they are in the business of providing email accounts. And for them the more accounts the better. What pays your so called free email account is the advertising footer you send away every time you send an email and the advertisements you have to see when you check you email. Or you think that free email accounts don’t work with outlook (or any email software) just because they forgot to add that feature??

Another annoying thing is those email about someone that has some health problem and desperately need medical attention, but does have the money for it. It usually has a shocking photo attached, and usually a foundation or NGO offers to help that person. The problem is that the foundation or NGO will only raise one cent for each mail that is sent away, probably from some sponsor. Now the thing is, IT IS NOT TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE TO COUNT EMAILS CIRCLING THE INTERNET ABOUT A SPECIFIC SUBJECT!!

So, there is no sponsor that will pay this foundation or NGO one cent per email to help this specific person. A lot of people need help around the world, I’m sure you have someone in you area that you can help if you really want to, or if you want to help the ones that need the most, contact the RED CROSS, AMI or any other global NGO, they will gladly accept your help. The simple act of sending a chain-letter email WILL NOT HELP ANYONE.

The best thing you can do when you get these emails is to DELETE them. They are a waste of bandwide and server space. They only help to turn the internet slower and to feed other unsolicited advertising emails.

However if you really want to send an email to a group of friends, one that you have written or verified it authenticity, don’t put all you friend addresses in the “TO” field, use the “BCC” or “CCO” fields, this way each of friends will only see his own email address, instead of the email address of every one you have send the email to. Of course, you always have to write something in the “TO” field, but put in your own address or an inexistent one.

Well, I’m not going to bother you any more with this, if you already knew this, great, keep on deleting those stupid emails. If this is new for you, I hope you will think twice before forwarding another chain-letter, but remember will not died, nor suffer, nor a big disgrace will happen to you if you break the chain. BREAK THE CHAIN ;)

Stay safe,

Allex