In these modern times an email address identifies an individual, just as his/her name, residence address or any other personal information would, which this information is protected by privacy laws all over the globe. These laws are violated daily, through unsolicited email (spam) sent by individuals or companies to advertise their products or services.

Chain Letters
Any email that you receive daily in your inbox forwarded from friends, colleagues and associates containing any content ranging from jokes, pictures, funny videos, prayers, wishes, to complaints and protests for certain events that happened long in the past, can be categorized as a chain letter these days, as it is forwarded from one machine to another on a daily basis, as if it was a plague.

It is also very annoying to receive an email ten pages long containing a two-line message at the very end after all the forward details of previous senders or even worse in the middle of the email content (if signatures are taken into account) to figure out the contents of a questionable attachment file.

As some emails state in their content; of course the emails can be tracked down, considering the tons of forwarded email addresses returning to the original sender, but what if the original sender is not the one claiming to be? “The easiest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” -taken from my favorite movie “Usual Suspects”.

Unsolicited Emails
Now lets flip the coin to examine how spam is involved in all this.
Consider the above example, containing forwarded details of ten (10) senders that could easily accumulate upto a hundred (100) recipient email addresses of other individuals not even in your contact list. Of course there is no bad intention in forwarding other people’s email addresses along with the email message body, as after all the email is sent from trusted sources to trusted destinations, but this is still a violation of their privacy.

In any case, now imagine this email being received by the above said individuals or companies that want to promote their products or services. They will not hesitate one second to add all those tons of email addresses in their bot and engage the attack by sending you unsolicited emails, forever.
Because you might think this situation is far fetched, as there are no trust issues between senders and recipients, as said above, consider the same email being received, or opened on an infected machine, the consequences could be the same or even worse! (as we all know, not everyone is capable of maintaining their machines in top shape, in regard of external threats, such as viruses, trojans etc)

It is well known that spammers employ various techniques -such as website/email filtering and machine scanning- for collecting victims email addresses for sending unsolicited emails, one could as well be chain letters.

Solution
To conclude, if you still want to forward an email (chain letter) to a considerable number of contacts please…

Before forwarding an email asking your contacts to sign-up their name or email to support a cause, make sure that the complaint, protest, petition, is actually a current issue (making a web search), unless you want to irritate them. Outdated emails for a specific cause that have lapsed, become spam by themselves.

Now the actual procedure of forwarding a chain letter:

• First, strip-off the message body from all previously forwarded email addresses, to ensure the privacy of the previous recipients
• Use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field instead of TO field, that all good email clients have -but nobody appreciates its use- to ensure the privacy of the forward recipients

This way emails get sent individually and no recipient knows each other recipients’ email addresses.

Please encourage your contacts to act the same way!