Tech Tuesday: Use Caution When Sending Forward
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Don't get me wrong, I love the jokes, pictures, and YouTube movie links as much as the next person - I send quite few myself. But, out of courtesy for those previous senders and before I send anything that has been forwarded to me, I remove any reference to any previous sender including names, businesses, e-mail addresses, etc. There are a couple reasons why.
First, some people may use their business e-mail address, either by accident or because they are only sending to "a few friends," but if I forward that e-mail on to a few friends of my own and one of those friends only sends to a few friends, through the power of the Internet, that "business only" e-mail address could wind up in the boss' inbox. And for the few seconds of joy making "a few friends" chuckle, I could have just cost my friend a job.
Second, maybe the item sent was the boss at last summer's company picnic letting his comb-over down, and although it was sent from a cryptic home e-mail address, I left my buddy's name at the bottom – no more company picnics for my friend.
Third, maybe something you sent is funny to you and "a few friends" but not everyone else. So you forward a picture of a police officer asleep with the radar gun hanging out the window and box of doughnuts on the dashboard to a "few friends" and somewhere down the line that e-mail gets forwarded on to a cop who lives two doors down.
Maybe it was your friends or maybe it wasn't, but the officer sees your name somewhere in the body of the e-mail – you might want to plan on taking the bus to work for the next couple months. (Note to local police: I would never forward any pictures of our extremely overworked, underpaid finest who are forced to eat breakfast out of box catching up on some much-needed sleep.)
The above are all lighthearted what-ifs, but the real reason I believe one should remove any reference to the sender(s) is for security reasons. As discussed previously on Tech Tuesday, many Web sites require a valid e-mail address be used as the login, and people being people, many use the same password for everything – hey it's easy to remember. But if this is true, then access to the buymenow.com Web site may mean access to your online banking, your Facebook or MySpace account, online forums you may contribute to and possibly your own e-mail account.
I'm not going to attempt to reinvent the wheel and go through all the possible recipes for disaster. Here is a quick, simple to understand, a pretty thorough blog entry that says it all much better than I could. Do yourself and all your friends and family a favor and read this blog entry from One Man's Blog. It just may save your identity (and few parking tickets).
C.J. Vadnais is president of the Southern Vermont Broadband Cooperative in Stamford, Vt. His opinions are his own. You can send him jokes and chain e-mails at Tech_Tuesday@yahoo.com.
