Mail Forwarding Can Make Spam

Forwarding a mail to other people can be a valuable thing to make others informed on a given subject. However adding your entire friends email addresses on the 'To' section can do a great harm even you without knowing. When people forward mails over and over again as mentioned, at a given time a mail can contain hundreds of email addresses. So when this kind of a mail reaches a person or a company who is looking for email addresses to be used for their advertising and spamming activities they extract the addresses and update their databases. After sometime it becomes a resource for them and they even tend to sell it as a service. People who need advertising might reach these people to send mails for them.

The worst part of this scenario is when we get spam mails we will not be able to do anything to stop them rather we will only be able to mark them as spam and let them come to our spam folder. Or we might need to change our email address, but in most cases it might not be possible when it’s our corporate email address or main personal email address. The more important fact is if these spammers analyze forwarded mails very carefully they might be able to find the names connected with the email addresses and send us mails as our friends. Moreover they might be able to automate this process :-) and send mails programmatically. So you might click on links or open those mails even without knowing they are spam.

The best solution for this problem is not to add email addresses to the ‘To’ section when you forward mails to your friends and family and use the ‘Bcc’ section. Then no one will be able to see the other peoples email addresses that you have sent the mail. I think this is a very common thing which most people aware of but we don’t take it that serious :-)