Mail Tracking---Must read

From My InBox:

Here is something everyone should read. If you don't, you're hurting yourself and your email buddies.
Please read to the end.

By now, I suspect everyone is familiar with www.snopes.com and/or www.truthorfiction.com for determining whether information received via email is just that: true/false or fact/fiction. Both are excellent sites.

Advice from Snopes.com --Very important!

1) Any time you see an email that says forward this to '10' of your friends, sign this petition or you'll get bad luck or good luck, you'll see something funny on your screen after you sent it. It almost always has an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward the mail to!

The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then it is able to get lists of 'active' email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other spammers. Even when you get emails that tells you to send the email on if you're not ashamed of God/Jesus .... that's email tracking! They're playing on our conscience! These people don't care how they get your email addresses - just as long as they get them. Also, emails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease 'how would you feel if that was your child' .......they are all email tracking!!! Ignore them! Don't participate!

2) Almost all emails 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 that was to get names and 'cookie' tracking information for telemarketers and spammers - to validate active email accounts for their own profitable purposes.

You can do your friends and family members a GREAT favor by sending this information to them; you will be providing a service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam emails in future!

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

Do yourself a favour and STOP adding your name(s) to those types of listings, regardless how inviting they might sound, or make you feel guilty if you don't .. it's all about getting email addresses - nothing more! One email doing the rounds for the third time is the whales being killed on a beach in Denmark . Email address of every one who forwarded that are now with the spammers!

You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause - YOU ARE NOT! Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus attached! Plus, you are helping the spammers get rich!!

Also, email petitions are NOT acceptable to the White House, Congress, UNESCO, UNICEF or any such organizations. To be acceptable, petitions must have a signed signature and full address of the person signing the petition. So this is a waste of time and you're just helping the email trackers.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, DON'T FORGET TO:

1. DELETE other people’s email addresses BEFORE forwarding emails that

you receive.



2. When forwarding/sending email, send as b.c.c. so that the receipients'

email addresses cannot be seen or tracked.


You notice that the only name up top of this email is mine. If you wish to FORWARD this, please DELETE my name/ email address.

Have I been phished by established companies?

I have many emails sometimes directed to my junk mail box by mistake. So, whenever I can, I do check to see if I have missed messages from friends or people who have responded to articles I have posted on my blogs. So, how do I tell if it is safe for me to open up the email to read? Here are some pointers I have picked up:

1) The name of the sender is usually different from that on the email address.
2) The name of sender is gibberish.
3) The subject matter promotes things that I have not requested for or have no interest in.

I also do a search of the company the email came from, eg (name of company) scam, and see what comes up. Following is a very good example:

Message from: Yahoo! Photos Subject: Yahoo! Photos Is Closing - Action Required

I do have an account there but instead of opening up the mail and clicking on the link provided that may lead me to a bogus website, I goggled, "directmail@yahoo-inc.com scam" and discovered that someone on Yahoo! Answer has the same enquiry and that indeed Yahoo! Photos request is not a scam and that they want members to move their photos and they have recommended Flickr.

I also take the time to block senders who spam. You can find out what are the big companies whose members have been targeted by phishers from this article "How to Report an Email or Web Scam" posted on Fight Identity Theft.

And if you are wondering why I should believe the information and instruction posted on Fight Identity Theft; well, I have checked them out on Site Advisor.

Spammed and Harvested

To be spammed is bad enough but to be spammed by your own email address is too much to bear.

I noticed in my junk mailbox, that I have being receiving emails from a company, tdameritrade.com, dealing in investment. However, when I point my cursor on the sender to view the email address, I am surprised to see that it is from my own email address!

So, other than sending the message to myself, who else has this company being sending the same messages to? My suspicion is confirmed when I started receiving complains from facilitators of forums that I am active at, that one or more of their members are harvesting email addresses to spam members of the group.

What did I do about it? I search "tdameritrade spam" and see that there were many postings by others who have dealings with the company who also complained that they have been spammed by this company. But I do not have any dealings with this company, so, how did they get my email address and how did they manage to hijack my account?

Through this search, I also discovered a posting by Project Honey Pot on the spam message supposedly emailed by TD Ameritrade, showing the IP address where the actual message came from. They are able to tracked it!

It commented that spammers tend to make up addresses or forge the addresses of real, legitimate users in their messages. Even if an email address, company name, or other information appears in your inbox, it does not mean that they belong to a spammer. Read all you want to know about spammers at their FAQ page and see what you can do to stop spammers from spoiling your reputation without you even knowing that it is happening.