Martha's Place

Spyware/Virus Can Arrive in a Little Yellow Envelope or Sp*mmer's Delight

Don't open emails with a lot of 'Forwarded message attached' in them. I used to open them, but not any more.

I have seen emails that have the 'little yellow envelope' in them for seven or eight times and each of them has a lot of email addresses. All it takes is for one of the 'forwarded again and again who knows how many more times' to fall into the hands of your local spammer and guess what happens now? And the malware writers are slipping in their nasty little scripts and spyware stuff into unsuspecting 'Forwards' and spoofing email addresses. You may think this 'Forward ' came from cousin Sally, but did it really? Web based email is bad about forwarding an email as an attachment, as well as AOL. Some others may as well, but I know about these. My email provider will forward email as an attachment if I read email on the web.

There is a way to check but you have to know how to read the email 'Properties'. So either delete the little missives unread, take the time to learn how to read the 'Properties' or take a chance on getting some evil planted on your computer.

Sometimes you would like to forward one of these emails yourself. If you were brave enough (or dumb enough, harsh words but oh so true!) to open those little yellow envelopes again and again and think the joke/information is good enough to warrant sending on to a whole bunch of other folks, don't! Instead select all, copy and paste into a brand new email. Add all of your email addresses using BCC instead of TO (put your own email address in the TO field) and the only email address you will be showing to all of your recipients is yours.

So if you are forwarding an email to me and it comes to me as an attachment, it will be deleted unread. Sorry, but I don't want the ugly stuff that could come in disguised as an attachment.