Looking back at my previous posts here, I came across my blog about email forwarding. It was a public information drive that never really got off the ground. So now I’m at it again. This time, I will try to harvest and count how many email addresses I can gather from a few of the chain emails that get forwarded to me.

First off, I checked the inbox in my Yahoo! email account. I selected the last forwarded messages I received. Here are the subjects of those emails, you might recognize them:

• Fw: Fwd: Fw: FORWARD MO LANG ANG EMAIL NA ITO – BUHAY KO ANG KAPALIT – SALAMAT!!!
• FW: The Rope!
• Fw Is your computer male or female !!
• FW: The Purpose Driven Life
• Fw God
• Fw please sign and forward
• FW 1139

Then, I used a small application to harvest email addresses from those emails. Afterwards, I collated the email addresses into an .xls file and voila! I got 613 valid email addresses.

If one-fourth (25%) of those who got those forwarded messages forward the messages again, you’ll have 153 people forwarding to, let’s say, 10 people each; that’s 1530 email addresses. Now, if those 1530 people send to another 10 people each, we’ll have 15300 email addresses and the process  would go on and on. Imagine 15300 or more email addresses in the hands of spammers.  No wonder you get spammed  even though you limit the number of people you give out your email address.

So now, I’m again suggesting this simple solution to prevent spammers from getting our email addresses:

When you forward any of these emails, make sure you put the recipients’ addresses into the Bcc field not the To field. That way, those addresses won’t appear in the body of the message when someone else forward your email.

I hope everyone will be responsible enough and will be concerned enough to take the extra step of ensuring that we don’t help the spammers spam some more.

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