Joy Harjo's Web Log

From Snopes.com

To whom it concerns:

A word to the wise. E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other municipality. To be acceptable petitions must have signed signatures and your full address. Same with "prayer chains" -be wary.

Almost all e-mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards All it was, and all this type of e-mail is, is to get names and "cookies" tracking info for tele-marketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own purposes.

Any time you see an e-mail that says forwar d this on to "10" of your friends, sign this petition, or you'll get good luck, or whatever, it has either an ! e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to, or the host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of "active" e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to others that do.

Please forward this notice to others and you will be providing a good service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting 30,000 spam e-mails in the future.

(If you have been sending out the above kinds of email, now you know why you get so much spam!)

Check it out: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm