Summary: Electronic Greeting Cards, or ecards, seem like a nice idea, but often end up giving the recipient more than intended, in the form of spam or worse.
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I recently sent a friend of mine an electronic greeting card. He replied that I shouldn't have. He said that because of my good intentions, he'd now be getting even more spam than ever. Is he right? Did I just screw up? |
In a word: maybe.
Electronic greeting cards seem like such a good idea. A quick point and click at a ecard service and you can send a cute virtual "card" via email. Quite often they're even animated, and with sounds or music in the background.
And quite often they have a hidden agenda.
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Think about it ... what's the one piece of information that a e-card service needs to have in order to deliver your card?
The email address of the recipient.
Now, how certain are you that the only thing they're going to do with it is send the card? How do you know that they won't now take your friend's email address and add it to a list of known-good email addresses that they can then spam, or sell to those who do?
It's a real dilemma. The same's actually true of any service that offers to email someone on your behalf. Ever seen those links that say "send this article to a friend"? The same potential exists there as well.
And, with all due respect, the fact that a site's privacy policy says "we won't spam" doesn't guarantee that they won't. Even here on Ask Leo!, I say it - how do you know I'm not lying? In fact, you don't. You can choose to believe, as I of course hope you do, but you might also choose to be skeptical. And I can't blame you.
So what are your alternatives?
Deal only with reputable sources - if you've never heard of the service, then steer clear. On the other hand, a larger company with an established reputation, say the Hallmark greeting card company, is more likely to maintain their reputation and play honestly. They have an extensive privacy policy on their website, and I choose to believe it ... because they are Hallmark.
Do it yourself - let's face it, the basic online greeting card is nothing more than a pretty picture with some well chosen words. A few minutes with a graphics program and your own photos and you can achieve similar results, without involving a third party. And your own photo and message is likely to be more meaningful anyway.
Use "old technology" - speaking of more meaningful, since it's a little more work, a paper card that you purchase, sign, address and put in the mail yourself is always going to mean more than something you can do in a click or two online. Send a real card.
Related:
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Ask Leo! - Why are internet petitions a bad idea?
Ask Leo! - Why shouldn't I forward this email asking me to "forward to everyone I know"?
Article C2435 - October 12, 2005
On my site, http://www.funnybutsick.com , our "mail this to a friend" button is actually just a complex "mailto" link (one that tells your mailer to generate a new e-mail). What many people don't realize is that you can specify the subject and even the body of a message in a mailto link.
So, let's say you don't want to specify an e-mail address, but do want to specify the subject and body of the message.
<A HREF="mailto:?Subject=This is Great&Body=You have to check out this site.%0A%0Ahttp://www.url.com">
That link causes their mail program to start a new e-mail with the subject of "This is Great" and the following body (the %0A bits caused line breaks):
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You have to check out this site.
http://www.url.com
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All they have to do is fill out the friend's e-mail address and send it on. It works with most of the modern mail programs and browsers. This way they can rest assured that you're never seeing the e-mail address, because it's never going through your site.
It also helps stop abuse of your mailing forms and stops them from being marked as spam because they're going through the sender's mail program, not being sent as form-generated mail.
- Greg
Posted by: Greg Bulmash at October 13, 2005 2:01 PMIt is true to be wary about electronic greeting sites that is why it is a good idea to use the reputable ones that have strict privacy policies such as 123greetings.com otherwise you could always use sites that allow you to send real greeting cards and just skip ecards altogether such as moonpig and http://www.postit4u.com.au
Posted by: Fred Gramly at November 7, 2005 4:48 AMAfter receiving a card from 123greeting.com I got a lot of spam. I always put this down to 123greeting.com as it was an e-mail address i only gave out to friends and I did not get spam on that account before. - Beware
Posted by: Martin Jones at December 14, 2005 3:05 AMIf it's an animated gif, try right-clicking on it and saving it, then email it to the person.
If it's flash, I don't know if you can save by the right-click menu, but it should be in your temporary internet files somewhere. Otherwise have them email it you, then send it on to your friend. At least you'll get the spam then, not your friend.
Also, with that mailto thing, can you be sure that it really is the card that gets sent to your friend and not something else, like porn or a virus?
Posted by: jodie at January 29, 2006 8:27 PMI am running a web site called
http://365greetings.com
I have started mainly because of the iritating pop ups which other companies put it on their site. Also I do not believe in selling the email adress to third party as it will be actually do negative effect in long run.
I hope lot of services will come up who will push out this greedy people who is putting excess popups and selling email adress
Posted by: sajithkumar at February 8, 2006 3:35 PMi like cards becausa it is fun
Posted by: mubasshira at September 23, 2006 12:11 AMAfter unsubscribing an invalid email address from 123greetings.com (I route the malformed email at work, e.g., boob@ instead of bob@ ...), we got more spam but the nature changed from 'send a greeting card' to pill pushing. Pathetic.
Posted by: 123hater at November 21, 2006 6:25 AMAnd since I forgot to mention, the pill-pushing spam was from 123greeting.
Posted by: 123hater at November 21, 2006 6:26 AMhappy new year
Posted by: mukesh at December 13, 2006 8:49 PMI once registered to send a card via 123greetings; I've since been receiving 5-6 spam messages a day(From 'editor bob' or '123greetings', from mortgage refinancing to enlargement pills. No matter how many times I mark it at spam, they get around it.
Posted by: Don't use123 at May 9, 2009 7:47 PM