Here’s a quick quiz.  What do all of the following statements have in common?

• The sky is green
• The grass is blue
• The sun rises in the west and sets in the east
• Bill Gates will send you a per capita check paying you a certain amount of money for each person to whom you forward an E-mail
• If you download a screen saver named for a certain group of amphibians who like a certain brand of beer, it will crash your entire hard drive—so it’s very important to pass this on to as many people as you know
• You will receive good luck within a certain period of time if you forward a certain E-mail message to a certain number of people

Of course, the answer is that they are all totally incorrect.  In the case of the first three, it’s pretty easy to prove their falsity—just go outside and take a look at the sky, the grass, and the sun’s direction.  The last three are a slightly different story—it’s still pretty easy to prove they’re not correct, but in spite of that many people still pass them on via E-mail thousands of times on thousands of mail servers every year.

This E-mail traffic doesn’t actually benefit either the sender of the messages or the recipients.  Good luck does not come as the result of chain E-mails, there is no screen saver referring to beer amphibians that will crash your hard drive, and Bill Gates will not be sharing his fortune with you if you forward this message to everyone you know.  However, the dirty little secret of these messages is that there is someone who does benefit from them . . . and that someone is a person who you wouldn’t suspect of being involved in them and would probably want to stop if you had the chance to do so.

Here’s the story.  Most E-mail messages are sent across the Internet in some form of text.  A great number of them are formatted as plain text and sent across your connection as such, easily readable by any computer which is connected to the Internet and programmed to view text moving across a connection.

Some messages are formatted as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) code, which surrounds the text of the messages with formatting codes that apply special formatting such as colors, sizes, and fonts.  But a message with HTML code can still be intercepted and easily read by stripping the codes to leave the text itself.

The same holds true for messages sent using rich text format.  The text is surrounded by formatting codes . . . but strip those codes away and you still have the text of the message, easily readable.

There is a way to encrypt E-mail messages so that they can’t be viewed across the Internet . . . but it involves sending all of your messages with a digital encryption key that the recipient of your message would need to have on their computer in order to view it.  Most people don’t want to bother with making sure everyone in their address book has their digital key, and so most messages aren’t encrypted before they are sent.

So most E-mail messages travel from your mail server to your recipient’s mail server in a form that can be seen by any computer.  And again, some computers are programmed to monitor Internet traffic and intercept the text of any E-mail messages it sees.  Those computers then strip everything from the message except any E-mail addresses it can find in the text of the message (usually on the To: line or the CC: line of the message).

And that’s the dirty little secret of chain E-mails:  spammers and junk mail practitioners love them.  They use the computers we just discussed to intercept these messages and strip out the addresses, and add them to their spam and junk mail lists.  You can guess what happens next:  more junk mail in more mailboxes.

So if you want to do your part to cut down on junk mail, here’s some tips to remember:

1. Make absolutely sure that the message you’re forwarding is true.  It stands to reason that 99.9% of E-mails promising you good luck if you forward them to hundreds of people are not true.  For reports of new viruses and trojans, Symantec maintains an excellent Web site discussing virus hoaxes and giving factual information about them.  For general stories that may or may not be true, About.com has a very comprehensive Web site devoted to urban legends and folklore (such as the Bill Gates chain letter); use it to check out the truth of any E-mail claims you receive before passing them on.

2. Once you’ve determined that a message is true, make sure that the people you’re forwarding the E-mail to have a definite need to see its contents.  A message promoting a certain set of beliefs is a good example; not all the people on your address list may share those beliefs or may welcome seeing them in an E-mail message.  Be selective.

3. After that, make sure that you use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) option when sending a message to a large number of people.  This ensures that the addresses or your recipients are not included as part of the message . . . so spammers can’t see them or use them.  In our first-ever Info Bytes article, we discussed how to do that.

Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet—a little education, caution and common sense will prevent you and your loved ones from becoming just another address in a spammer’s book.