Every once in a while you get these jokes sent out by a friend or colleague. Most likely these emails were sent to dozens of people, as can be witnessed in the "TO:" field in the email. What these fine and dandy jokesters don't realize is that they are putting their friends' emails at risk of spam or virus attacks. When I receive such an email, I usually reply with the following message. I suggest you do the same! :)

Dear friend,

Great to hear from you! For your information, when you want to send an email to many people, mail it out by using the function called "BCC" (Blind Carbon Copy), available on Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo mail or in any email software such as Outlook. This way, the list of email recipients won't show up in the received message. This must be done for both privacy reasons and to slow down the spread of Internet-borne viruses. Using "BCC" instead of "TO" prevents everybody else from accessing your friends' email addresses, which could otherwise cause many nasty problems:

  1. Modern computer viruses called "Worms" silently propagate themselves, often by sending out infected email to email addresses found in received messages. If the computer of one of the listed recipients in the email is infected, this machine could very well spread its infection to the other recipients.
  2. Mentioning the whole list of recipients is akin to giving out their phone numbers: nobody wants their number given out to strangers (even if these are your friends, I do not know them all). Furthermore, if some of these recipients decide to forward this message to their friends, all these complete strangers will gain access to the email addresses of the original email. Not a very reassuring thought!
  3. Not everyone shares the same values as you do. Some recipients, most likely when the message has been forwarded many times over, could very well be ill-intent low-life scum who will use these "valid" email addresses to send out spam. If you wonder sometimes how come you receive Viagra or mortgage offers when you have given out your email address only to your friends, it's probably because of this. It's pretty much the equivalent of giving out your friends' phone numbers to a telemarketing firm so that they can annoy your friends all the time. While you can remove your name from a telemarketer's directory, you simply cannot remove it from a spammer's list: these spammers have no conscience and are accountable to no-one. Once you're on their list, these dirty evil polluters will just keep on sending you their trash and may even share their lists amongst themselves.

This being said, I'm not saying this to be mean or anything, but to help you avoid unknowingly causing problems to your friends. I really appreciate receiving news from you, as long as these messages don't jeopardize the relative safety of my mailbox!

Sincerely,

Your friend