Spam in a can

Posted on 25 May, 2006 by maximinus in Rant

One more type of spam that annoys me: multiply-forwarded messages.

These can take one of two forms (or a combination of both):

• "forward this to x people or y will happen"
• joke / funny story / funny pictures

The first kind has absolutely no merit whatsoever, and only serves to either piss people off, or, if it's sent to morons or paranoid people, cause ever-increasing numbers of the message to be flooded around the 'net.

The second kind is alright, so long as it's actually funny.

The biggest problem I have with both of these types of message is the "multiple-forward" / "chain mail" part.  This is because nobody ever thinks to remove the headers from the previous forwards, so:

• in order to get to the actual content (if you can call it that) it becomes necessary to scroll through several large batches of message headers
  
• more importantly, this is a security risk.

To expand on the second point, it is essentially just giving my email address (and that of anyone else it's been sent to) to everyone else that it gets sent to after the generation that I was sent it in.  If one of these messages happened to get into the hands of somebody who wanted to send more intrusive spam, they would now have access to potentially hundreds or thousands of known-good email addresses.  All it takes is one person to send it to a spammer, or one person to sell the list to a spammer.  Even if no spammer gets hold of it, many people whom I probably don't know are going to receive my email address.  Any of these people can then contact me or sign me up for spammy newsletters, or do whatever else they like with my email address.

Why do these people find it necessary to forward crap to me?  I don't mind the occasional joke etc, so long as it's funny, but the chain mail "forward or die" type messages are just stupid and a waste of resources.  If you are going to forward a joke email (or, heaven forbid, a "forward or die" message) - at least remove the headers from all the previous forwards, and USE BCC.  BCC is there for a reason - so you don't go giving everyone's addresses to everyone else.  Send it to yourself, with the list of people you want to forward to in the BCC field.  It only takes a few seconds to remove all the headers from the message body, and even less time to type your own address in the "to" field and use the BCC field for all the other addresses.

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