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Summary: We've all get emails asking us to forward the email so that some entity will make a donation to some cause. Don't. Just don't. It's an email hoax.
It's been a while since I've touched on this topic, so it's overdue. Forwarding an email will not help anyone. Forwarded email cannot be tracked. Let me say that again: forwarded email cannot be tracked. So don't forward it. Please. It's an email hoax. • I'm actually fairly amazed at the number of times something will get forwarded around that is so obviously a hoax. Paraphrasing from a previous article of mine, "Why shouldn't I forward this email asking me to 'forward to everyone I know'?" : No one is tracking your email, and no one will pay you or donate to some charity to forward this. This isn't just because I or anyone else says so, it's very simple: Email cannot be reliably tracked. Even if a company or individual wanted to do what these hoax emails claim, they simply cannot. Even if they did use some form of image tracking or "web bug", as they're known, there are two massive problems with the approach: "If it says 'forward this to
as many people as you can' ... DON'T."
The rule of thumb is very simple: If it says "forward this to as many people as you can" ... DON'T. That, all by itself, is the single biggest indicator that what you've got in your inbox is a hoax. To once again quote my earlier article:
So how do you "check it out"? There are many, many resources. My favorite is Snopes.com which is kept amazingly up to date, even though the vast majority of scams circulating on the internet are years, sometimes even decades old. Based only on the information presented in the question above, I was able to locate the very hoax mentioned: Rachel Arington. On that page you can see that the "Zimbawean" aspect was an addition to the original hoax in 2001, and that the same hoax is floating around in many variations and attributed to many different children. On behalf of everyone you might forward these kinds of things to:
Related:
Article 12300 | Posted March 18, 2008 |
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Excellent, now I can show this article to a few relatives of mine instead of having to explain it. Thanks.
Posted by: Matt at March 18, 2008 01:12 PMI am so glad for your article. I have told people time and time again to use snopes.com to check something that's questionable that they have either received or read on the internet including those forwarded e-mails you mentioned. Maybe hearing from an established computer user, then maybe somone will finally take me seriously.
Posted by: Roger Howell at March 18, 2008 06:17 PMI can trace my part of the chain back to a member of staff at a college. It went from colleges to hospitals. From my part of the chain I know over 50 e-mail addresses. I will be writing to all these people telling them about this article, and also pointing out how undesirable it is to publicise other people's addresses without their permission. Perhaps Leo could do another article on the use of bcc rather than cc.
Posted by: Natalie Kehr at March 18, 2008 11:30 PMForward this to as many people as you can!
(joke)
Posted by: Bill P. Godfrey at March 19, 2008 05:58 AMForwarding mail can really come back to haunt you, as one lady discovered: http://www.thisistrue.com/warning.html
Posted by: Randy at March 21, 2008 08:32 PMAsking (possibly inexperienced) users to remember a specific URL (e.g. snopes.com) will generally not work.
Posted by: Nick H. at March 22, 2008 04:08 PMMaybe better to advise all unsure recipients to simply 'Google' the subject line of the message; it is pretty much guaranteed that they will end up at snopes or similar anyway.
Thanks for all the articles ... Cheers.
Nick H. France