Emails Proceed with Caution

I just love these emails you get that says if you forward this to 10 people something cool is going to happen. Or the one, that if you forward this email to 100 people Bill Gates will give you $100.00. Even ones that play on your sympathy, that a small child in the hospital will get better if you forward the email to 100 people.
First don’t get bent out of shape when you get an email addressing a particular cause that my strike a nerve. Check it out. One great place I use is www.snopes.com. Snopes addresses Urban Myths and emails that have been circulating that have no fact.
Second Never give out Personal information and passwords. I’m not aware of any ISP that will ask for you to email them your password. Typically not even the ISP keeps track of these kinds of things and if you forget yours the best thing to do is reset it. I recommend be very careful about posting specific personal information on web pages, myspace, facebook and others. Of course most people don’t care about things like “I went riding today and had a great time.” But I would avoid such things as addresses, phone numbers, age, birth date, and avoid surnames. Obviously if your doing genealogy that’s a little tricky. Just be smart and have common sense. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others are always searching for information. Try putting your own name in Google some time. Try your phone number. It doesn’t take much to find someone.
Third a hidden, but non-trivial side effect of forwarding emails is that your email address is likely to be forwarded along with it and will probably end up in a large number of email in-boxes in diverse regions of the planet. Once the forwarded email begins its journey from your computer, to the Rest Of The World, you have absolutely no control over how many times the email gets forwarded and, of course, how many times your private email address gets forwarded right along with it. Your email address is likely to end up, not only in the private in-boxes of complete strangers, but also on mailing lists, news groups, online forums and the hard copy someone printed off to show Great Uncle Vinny. Sooner or later, it is possible, even probable, that your email address will cross the in-box of your friendly neighborhood spammer. Spammers must love emails that have been forwarded a number of times. For them, the dozens of valid addresses that such emails have collected upon their journey through cyberspace must seem an enticing bonus. This is certainly not the only way that spammers get hold of email addresses, but I do believe that it is a significant factor. If there is something in an email you want to share try copying and pasting to a new email. It’s also good to understand cc and bcc about.com is a good place to learn about that.
Finally Safety is just as important on the internet as it is in every aspect of our daily lives. Identities can be stolen, Finances ruined, and sometimes even our mortal safety can be jeopardized by wrong actions. The Internet is a vast library of knowledge. It can be the foundation of great creativity and a wonderful source for fun and entertainment when used properly. Sky-View technologies offers spam filtering and web page filtering that can help. Sky-View also offers Network assistance that can help protect your home wireless network too. If you have questions on how to make your internet experience safer give us a call or drop us an email.
Happy Internet Surfing from GM Jim :)