Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Aw! No Friendly Message.

LeeHow I hate those forwarded messages that greet us when we open our email. Anticipating some friendly news, we are really happy when we see the sender's name, but alas we see the subject "Re: Fwd".

No personal message, no news of a friend's latest doings. No, just another "Fwd" glurge or dire warning.

I try, hopefully with tact, to encourage my friends and relatives to exclude me from all their spam emails, without taking me out of the loop of their personal emails which I love to receive. I do want to know about and see photos and videos of their latest trip, family get together or newest baby! I eagerly want to hear and see about their garden, the books they read, the food they are cooking. No matter how mundane it is, if it is about them, I am interested!

To add insult to injury, most email spam messages are false. Spoofers create them God knows why. Maybe they do this for the thrill of robbing us of our time or they enjoy the power trip of successfully commanding us to "Forward to everyone". The everyone is unfortunately us.

I realize some of my dearest friends and relatives will not be able give up forwarding emails. In an effort to encourage them to at least filter and send only spams which pass the test for validity, here are links to check out spam messages.

  1. http://www.snopes.com/
  2. http://urbanlegends.about.com/
  3. http://www.hoax-slayer.com/

A new version of forward spams concerns gift-card scams and stores closings. This site addresses these problems. Your best bet is probably to read the Wall Street Journal.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/business/a/store_closings.htm.

Take the Boulder Pledge

The Boulder Pledge is a personal promise, first coined by Roger Ebert in 1996, not to purchase anything offered through email spam. The pledge is worded by Ebert as follows:
"Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community."