From Snopes.com...reminder

[Esther]

From Snopes.com

If you are going to pass something along?, Let it be THIS!
To whom it all concerns:

Just a word to the wise. E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other municipality. To be acceptable, petitions m ust have a signed signature and full address. Same with "prayer chains" -- be wary.

Almost all e-mails 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 it was, and all this type of e-mail is, is to get names and "cookie" tracking info for telemarketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own purposes.

Any time you see an e-mail that says forward this on to "10" of your friends, sign this petition, or you'll get good luck, or what ever, it has either an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to, or the host sender is getting a copy Each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of "active" e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to others that do.

Please forward this notice to others and you will be providing a good service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting 30,000 spam e-mails in the future.

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

Check it out: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm

[Elizabeth]

I didnt know that!

[Ron]

Originally Posted by Esther

From Snopes.com

If you are going to pass something along?, Let it be THIS!
To whom it all concerns:

Just a word to the wise. E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other municipality. To be acceptable, petitions m ust have a signed signature and full address. Same with "prayer chains" -- be wary.

Almost all e-mails 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 it was, and all this type of e-mail is, is to get names and "cookie" tracking info for telemarketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own purposes.

Any time you see an e-mail that says forward this on to "10" of your friends, sign this petition, or you'll get good luck, or what ever, it has either an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to, or the host sender is getting a copy Each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of "active" e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to others that do.

Please forward this notice to others and you will be providing a good service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting 30,000 spam e-mails in the future.

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

Check it out: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm

My name is Ron & I live at ........

[Trouvere]

I hate chain letters.

[Praxeas]

Wait a second. If you are asked to visit a website and "sign their petition" and they say they are sending it to a congress man or several, that does not mean the same thing. IF there is a petition drive like we had here in CA to push for a recall then legally it has to be signed with the address.

But if all you are attempting to do is say "Hey look Senator so and so, look how many people are irked about such and such issue" then whether the Senator considers this is totally up to him. It's not a legal petition to force something, rather it's more like a public poll

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by Esther

From Snopes.com

If you are going to pass something along?, Let it be THIS!
To whom it all concerns:

Just a word to the wise. E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other municipality. To be acceptable, petitions m ust have a signed signature and full address. Same with "prayer chains" -- be wary.

Almost all e-mails 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 it was, and all this type of e-mail is, is to get names and "cookie" tracking info for telemarketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own purposes.

Any time you see an e-mail that says forward this on to "10" of your friends, sign this petition, or you'll get good luck, or what ever, it has either an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to, or the host sender is getting a copy Each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of "active" e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to others that do.

Please forward this notice to others and you will be providing a good service to your friends, and will be rewarded by not getting 30,000 spam e-mails in the future.

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

Check it out: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm

BTW only the the FBI can legally track emails. This is true about those dumb email chain letters. I ignore them

[Dimples]

Snopes is a good source to check before passing on dumb emails.

[HeavenlyOne]

And here I thought that there was no such thing as a tracker program, which is why AOL and TimeWarner won't be sending me my $387 for every person I copy their email to! Now I'm told there are tracker programs for spam purposes! LOL!