Editor's note: Lou's taking a short hiatus from his column, but suggested we repost some of his past writings. His article, "Are You Guilty of Spreading SPAM?" is still still timely advice, so enjoy!
I have lost count over the years, of the times I have sent the following info (author unknown) to friends, family, business associates, sometimes even to someone I don't know that has sent me a spam message. Are you guilty of spreading SPAM??? Are You Guilty of Spreading SPAM?
Are you guilty of spreading SPAM??? Gmail does a pretty good job of sorting it out…here is a screenshot of my spam folder after I had cleaned it out earlier…I get several hundred a day so this is a light load as it’s a Sunday as I write this.
So, do u help spread SPAM?
Read on, u may be surprised!
I have lost count over the years, of the times I have sent the following info (author unknown) to friends, family, business associates, sometimes even to someone I don’t know that has sent me a spam message.
If they were all this cute u wouldn’t mind, right? Unfortunately, many are not and as I covered in my previous column, they can result in some serious problems including the big, bad one…identity theft. So, u took my advice and now u own the worlds’ best collection of impossible to crack passwords! Great, but how are u doing on email etiquette? Lots of articles appear every week written by some of the top computer gurus who have syndicated columns that are read all over the country (and world, in some cases.) I could add all my pet peeves and perhaps cover some even the big fellows don’t hear much about, but rather than do a list, I’ll rely on each of you to read one or more of those columns, the next time you see one…or if you’re really ambitious, try out bing.com and do a search for email etiquette…that will keep u occupied for a long while. But, back to the question and a specific part of it…are you helping the spammers? Yikes, me help one of those @#$%^…no way Jose. OK, I hope u are right, but please, take the time to read what follows and if necessary, change the way you treat your next multi-address email. To help out those who may need it, I have included, at the end, a few screenshots of some of the more popular email programs and where to find the Bcc switch.
Sins of The Internet: Not Using Bcc
This is a little known yet very important issue on the web. Many good people commit this every day without knowing that there is an alternative, and without having any understanding of the very real damage that they are committing.
How many times have you received or sent an email with an address like this:
To: You@anywhere.com
Cc: Yourfriend@noone.org; Myfriend@anyplace.com;
Looks fine, doesn't it? Except for some simple facts. By including email addresses in the Cc field you are inadvertently helping spammers. Even worse you are violating the basic privacy of everyone to whom you have sent the message. In fact, in the worst case, you may have put all of these people in danger.
Huh? How can this be? This just a simple email!
Let's say you send this email to twenty friends. Each of those friends will receive the email addresses of you and all twenty of your friends. All of those email addresses will be conveniently listed at the top of the message for everyone to see. If one of your so-called friends is actually a spammer, you've just given him the email addresses of nineteen other people. He can add those to his lists and send spam messages to all of them. Even worse, these are very valuable email addresses, as they are confirmed and known to be good. They can actually be sold to some spammers for a fair amount of money!
Okay, let's say your friends are all fine, upstanding people who do not spam You have still put all twenty people in danger. How? Email is not private by any means. In fact, your message will wind up on at least a couple of machines by the time you read it, and might actually find it way to thousands of them!
Don't believe me? I worked as a consultant for a company several years ago. One day one of my fellow co-workers called me over to his system and asked me to look at something, a wide grin on his face. He had been working on our clients email system to fix a problem and accidentally listed out the email message file. He showed me a series of several hundred very explicit emails that two employees had been sending to each other for months! These two people would have been very embarrassed, I am sure, if they ever found out that we read every detail of their love affair - it was extremely x-rated in places!
So you see, your email may actually be read by anyone at any of those systems at any time! Thus, by including all of the addresses in the "cc" field, you can easily give away them away to spammers. Now, here is the dangerous part. What if it's not a spammer who gets this message, but someone dangerous? There are many people on the internet (as in
the real world) who are not so nice. Someone could send threatening messages to your friends. They could pretend they were you, or they could forward your message to other unscrupulous people.
Okay, that's the problem. Yet you want to send your message to several people! How do you do so without compromising the privacy of everyone else? That's easy. You see, your email program has a special capability called Blind Carbon Copy (bcc for short). This allows you to enter the email addresses of anyone you want, without sending all of the addresses to
everyone else on the list.
It's basically a way to send a copy to someone without telling anyone else that you did it. This is commonly used in a corporate environment to send a copy to someone who needs to know without alarming the rest of the people who receive the message. For example, I might want to let the Vice President know about an issue, but I may not want everyone else to know that I clued him in (in a office, copying senior management tends to produce office politics very quickly as everyone scrambles to protect their behinds). Sometimes email programs hide this option. To find it, just go to the help and look for "bcc" or "blind carbon copy". The help will tell you how to turn it on. Usually there is some option to show the Bcc field directly under the Cc field.
Here are screenshots of some of the more popular programs to get u there quickly.
Outlook 2007, when you click on options Show Bcc shows on the left alongside Show From
Outlook Express, click on view and select All Headers
IncrediMail, Click on View and select Show”Bcc” Field
MS Mail (Vista) Select View and click on show all fields
I have had an AOL Mail account for a long time…mine is called AIM and although I don’t use it much, it has an easy way to use Bcc. Just look to the right and u can select Cc as well as Bcc
That’s a wrap for now, please let me know if I can help u stay out of trouble out there and hopefully u will now be keeping the bad guys from sending their SPAM to anyone in your address book!
Aloha, Lou
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