I occasionally receive e-mails from friends, work colleagues, or relatives, that encourage you to forward the e-mail to as many people as you can. These are the so called "chain e-mails", because the process seems like the rings in a chain. For example, today I received an e-mail that claimed to be followed by Microsoft and that if you forward it to other people, at some point, Microsoft will contact you to send them your address information, so that they will eventually send you a cheque. The e-mail was so long, that 90% of it was the remains of other e-mail addresses, as other people did forward the message and the 10% was what I've just described above. You remember that when you forward an e-mail, by default the e-mail client puts all the content in the new message, indents it and leaves the message information as it was sent to you (from:, date:, subject: headers). I mark this with bold, because this is what this is all about. The purpose of these chain e-mails is for the e-mail to return at some point in the future to persons or entities that collect the inline e-mail addresses and put them in a list of e-mail addresses for spamming. So, congratulations, you've just become another spam victim.
For example, for this specific e-mail I received today, who on Earth would believe what it claimed? Why is Microsoft so stupid to send you money just because you forwarded an e-mail that claims to give you money if you forward it further? The real meaning of the e-mail is nothing. It just says "if you forward this, you will receive money from Microsoft". Well, it seems that there are a lot of people that put faith in these chain e-mails and forward them further. Ok, forward the message to as many other people as you like, but please add my personal e-mail address to BCC recipients (so that it won't be visible to the other recipients) and delete all other inline mail headers and just leave the message body. Then who knows, maybe at some point in the future you will receive a cheque with a million $ or so.
And speaking of spam, please add the e-mail address of f.papapetrou@gmail.com to your potential spam list, because today I also received another e-mail claiming to be from that address that was of course spam (and in Greek). So, it's f.papapetrou@gmail.com, don't forget it!
