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Do you like forward mails? I don’t like it. Kidding, I like it but I don’t like my email address showing with other email address on email. Every day I get many forwarded email from friends. These mails are interesting and generally having slides, pictures and/or interesting or funny things. In some way we are encouraged (some time forced/ threatened) to forward it. The funniest thing is we scare if there is written “if you forward this mail to 100 emails, you will be blessed by god otherwise you will be punished” or we became greedy when there is promised “Microsoft will pay you $250 if you forward it to 250 people”.

Generally we read these mails and immediately press “FORWARD” button and forward it to all the friends in our mailing list but we never care its side effect.  Forwarding such email means we are directly or indirectly helping spammer’s. In other words, we are promoting spammers, don’t be angry keep on reading.

The nature of forward mails is viral; it spreads all over the world quickly and efficiently. Generally aim of such mail is to spread it and collect as much possible valid email address. If we see the email’s body, we can see hundreds of email address are travelling with its contents and keep on increasing on every forward. Sooner or later, it goes to the hand of spammer.

If mail is forwarded my many times by many people it will be a perfect item for the spammer. They can collect hundreds of valid email address on its journey. Even they can easily filter invalid emails from bounced message. So aren’t we promoting spammer?

Do not scare, we can still forward emails but we can minimize it in some way if we do care following things while forwarding:
•    Spammers mail address may be in our mailing list, remove them from list.
•    Select the recipients carefully. This also helps us to minimize sending duplicate mail to same person.
•    When we click forward button, previous recipient’s mail address goes to body. Remove these email address from the body while forwarding.
•    Best ways is copy the content and send it as new mail. But this still doesn’t make sure our address will not travel with mail.
•    You can write a sweet request on the top of the message to remove previous address from body to stop spamming.
•    Do not use your official email address to forward email to other emails outside of office and vice versa.
•    Do not forward mail if you get it from unknown sender.
•    Use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) facility to forward mails to the people. This hides the name of other recipients.

Be safe and let others to be safe. Cheers !!