Don’t believe in email magic (or the email money fairy – she doesn't exist)
“If you forward this mail, you will be PAID MONEY!!!” - Look familiar?
Do you often get emails claiming that when you forward it to your entire contact list you will somehow receive a cheque for each email sent? Well, I’ve gotten a few and I just want to clear something up:
You will not get any money for sending an email to someone. There is no way of tracking these emails and there is no way of knowing where the money can be sent to. Please stop forwarding these lame emails.
One of the benefits of sending these emails to entire contact lists is that eventually, those email addresses will come to good use for a virus or spammer. Yes – that’s right; believing that the email money fairy is going to miraculously appear in your house with a bag o’ cash won’t happen – but you might just make a virus’s day.
You see, some viruses that infect your PC (and some spyware) scan you computer for email addresses. These lovely emails that you have been forwarding and receiving from your “pals” have tons of other email addresses in the CC line and the body. When the virus scans them, it send itself out (replicates itself) to these anonymous victims in hopes that they will get infected, and basically follow the same routine on their system.
Another awesome thing that could happen is that spyware could scan your system for all of these email addresses, upload them to a spammer’s server somewhere for safe storage until they are ready to send out their next blast of spam.
So please, understand, unless Bill Gates is actually sitting in your house with a cheque book waiting for you to forward these emails – don’t waste other’s time with these silly emails.
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