There are those which warn of pending viruses, or warn of attacks by car thieves etc. and you forward them or not at your own wish.
The type which ask "Forward this to ten friends and you will have good luck" are always best avoided as the mathematical possibilities are staggering , ludicrous and impossible. If you think about it, you send it to ten people and if they send it to ten people that is 100 people already. The next step will involve 1000 emails and the next ten thousand. These chain emails cannot work for that simple reason so you would be better to simply delete them and get on with something else.
The main point of this advice however is to urge security for you and your friends. Any email which you receive contains the email address of the sender. If you forward that email then the address appears as simple text in the first few lines of the email you are sending and this will pass on this information to the recipient UNLESS you delete it. I have received emails from people (mainly funnies which friends tend to send to one another) which, because they have been forwarded several times, contain fifty or sixty email addresses of recipients further up the line.
My advice is this. When forwarding an email, highlight and delete all reference to the person who sent it to you, and for good measure all previous addresses if they are present. This is done simply in the same way that you would delete text in a word processing document.
Secondly, if you are sending or forwarding an email to several people at once, make use of the provided fields at the top of the new email. You have fields which say "To:" where you would put the recipient’s email address, "CC:" where you would put a secondary email address if you wished to bring the communication to the attention of one or more people, AND want all recipients to know of the communication, (all email addresses will be shown to each recipient), and finally we have the "BCC:" field. In this you can type email addresses and none of the recipients will know the addresses of the other people to whom the communication was sent. Some email systems will require a name in the "To:" box whereas others will allow you to simply put all names in the "BCC:" box. If the former then simply put your own address in the "To:" box.
Don't forget that you should treat the email addresses of communicants with as much respect as their house address or telephone number.
We at the U3A send out a regular email to all members and make use of the "BCC:" field so that we are not broadcasting 2 or 3 hundred email addresses along with the letter.
Remember that if these multi-email addresses are displayed on emails, sooner or later they will fall into the hands of a hacker who will compromise the owner by sending out bad emails in their name. See also "My friends are receiving strange emails from me" earlier in this series.
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