Don’t be fooled: techniques for avoiding telemarketers, junk mail and spam

Any time you see an email that says “forward this on to ’10’ (or however many) of your friends,” “sign this petition,” or “you’ll get bad luck” or “you’ll get good luck” or “you’ll see something funny on your screen after you send it” or whatever — it almost always has an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward to. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of ‘active’ email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other Spammers.