Forwarding chain emails to everyone in your address book is a surefire way to get you into a spammer's list.

Every now and then, you'd probably receive some form of "chain" email. The contents of these emails are usually inspirational messages, jokes or hoaxes altogether. These chain emails usually end by saying something like "pass this email to at least 10 people including me" and attaches some silly condition to it like "or else something terrible may happen to you or your loved ones". The first and only thing you should do when receiving this forms of email is hit the delete button.

More often than not, these kinds of chain email are a surefire way of getting your email address added to a spammer's list. Worse, your email address gets listed in the address book of a user with a worm-infected email program and pretty soon, the worm will target you as the next victim. If you think this is impossible, it's really just simple mathematics and that's what a spammer is counting on.

When the spammer starts the chain email, they are counting on the recipient to pass the email to a friend, who passes it to another friend and so on down the line. By the third or fourth pass, your email would very likely have gone back to one of the original addressees of the spammer (remember the "including me" condition mentioned above) who would've sent the email back to the spammer along with a new haul of addresses in the CC line of the email. So expect the spam to come flooding in son and if you should be so unlucky, an infected email or two may also be coming around pretty soon.

Now if you have something in your mailbox that you feel you must really share (like maybe a really funny joke) with a lot of your friends, be thoughtful and use your email program's BCC feature. BCC stands for "blind carbon copy". Put all your friends' email addresses in the BCC field instead of the CC field.

This way, none of their addresses will show up on the headers of the other people's emails. You've at least protected them and saved them the likelihood of being targed for virus infection. In the TO field, you can probably just use a dummy address so that all that shows up in the other people's email is the dummy address. Of course the dummy address will bounce the email because it's non-existent but all the others in the BCC list will receive their copy.

Never, ever reply to spam mail. If you're not familiar with the term, SPAM is basically unwanted junk email. Like the email you receive about low mortgage rates, or sweet vacation deals, or how a man can increase his private part by x inches, these kinds of mail are sent out by unscrupulous marketers who insist on invading your privacy and selling you something you don't need. And while it is sometimes outrageous and you feel like sending an email back with some choice four-letter words, please do not!

Actually, most spam messages would usually tell you to "reply to such-and-such email address if you do not wish to receive future emails from us". This practice is referred to as "opt-out" and it is in fact required by law in some states in the USA. In reality it's just a ploy to get you added to more spammers' lists because by replying, the spammers know that your email address actually exists. Worse, the next time they send you junk email, it may be virus infected.