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Hi, I don't think you've answered this:
Why do people actually make forwards? I'm guessing that it's not just for fun so they must be making money from it? Maybe you don't want to tell how it works incase more people get on the bandwagon, but please I am genuinly interested and it would help me convince others how wrong it is.

Posted by: Ingrid at November 23, 2005 2:52 AM

Thanks SO much, Leo, for this excellent summary of the things to be wary of in your Inbox. I've started providing the link to this article to everybody who sends me one of the offending emails, for their edification. Well done!

Posted by: Tracey at January 15, 2006 2:08 PM

I have lately been getting e-mails stating to invest in stock. These are coming from people I don't even know! They also ask me to send them to friends and family. Funny part is I looked into the stocks and their losing money not making it. They pass through the spam filter by using titles like...Re: dental negotiation

Besides adding them to my spam filter how can I block these people out?

Posted by: Georg at August 16, 2006 6:22 AM

Sigh...not just urban legends (the Neiman-Marcus cookie one was making the rounds 15+ years ago when connections were still limited to dial-up BBSs) but the Internet equivalent of chain letters (send to 10 people and suddenly your life will change, of course for the better, until all your friends send you snippy comments about useless emails in their inbox), petitions (check the source first), "really cute" (and huge) pictures of animals that all your friends just HAVE to see, jokes, etc...PLEASE folks think about the recipient and whether a) they will really appreciate the message and b) they have the bandwidth to download it. I live in a rural community and pay a lot for satellite broadband (for my work) but most of my neighbours still use dialup and even they are guilty of passing on this stuff!

Think I'll bookmark this link for future replies to folks that I thoroughly like but who haven't fully learned "netiquette" yet....

Posted by: dunstergirl at March 18, 2007 10:45 PM

Years ago, a worker at the US Postal Service got an email with a dire warning about a virus. They hit a "forward to all" button that sent it to everyone in the USPS. And so did the next guy, and the next . . . Before it was done, they'd sent so many emails to so many people so fast, they crashed their email system. In this case, the EMAIL MESSAGE WAS THE VIRUS!

Posted by: Chuck at February 17, 2009 11:43 AM

Leo, thank you for this article. I emailed it last year to a friend who was always bombarding my old hotmail address with not only the hoaxes and misinformation you mentioned, but political/religious/wingnut messages. She apparently assumed I agreed with her on these, but some of them were so offensive I came very close to blocking her at one point. Your article solved my problem in that she apparently was offended by it: she no longer emails or talks to me. Which is both kind of sad and good, and a bit of an irony, since I taught her how to use email.

Posted by: sundog at February 9, 2010 9:52 AM

I'll forward this to everyone on my email list and encourage them to do the same!

Posted by: John at March 30, 2010 5:43 PM

The other thing about forwarding all these emails is that most do not erase the old email addresses of those that have forwarded these messages around for ever. I get people that send me these and I could make a fortune selling email addresses. Some messages I get are almost a megabyte in size for just the email addresses included in it.

Posted by: Darryl at November 30, 2010 5:47 PM

Since Facebook has come out, I've gotten much fewer of these kinds of emails. Instead of urban legend emails I see more and more of these re-post this on your status update messages. BTW has any one tried the "Nieman Marcus" recipe? Is is any good?

Posted by: Mark Jacobs at January 19, 2011 1:12 PM

do e-mail service providers pay money for forwarding mails .....

NO. Never. That's an urban legend.
Leo
31-Jan-2011

Posted by: mahendra at January 31, 2011 10:19 AM
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