My stance on chain emails (chain letters), especially "Christian" chain emails:

some may be cute, but it's still a chain letter. if a lot of people catch on to a chain email and "send to 10 people" it ends up flooding email servers & causing downtime. I usually edit out the chain portion & awful parts before before I forward them. I don't like chain emails because they basically try to curse you if you don't participate. Let's just call it for what it is. and the Bible says Romans 12:14 "Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.".

And what if one of these chain letters ends up in the hands of a Jewish person? They are the apple (pupil) of God's eye. no touch. "Genesis 12:1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
Genesis 12:2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
Genesis 12:3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

even if they are "Christian" and they contain dire consequences for not sending out the letter, I basically say Jesus didn't authorize that - it didn't come from heaven. Maybe it was from that other guy that that wants to put people in bondage.

I don't like chain letters.

I don't like participating in "forward this if you are not ashamed of Jesus" because it is goading you. some of these emails even put a curse on you if you don't participate, so I just delete the goad & curse and forward the neat part sometimes. usually I think the junk is something that someone has added.

"Luke 6:31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." I am still learning how to implement this verse.

BCC and privacy

BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) allows you to send email to a number of people without revealing their email addresses.

This issue was brought up to me by someone who mentioned it as a privacy problem.

BCC is available on Yahoo Mail, but you must enable the feature.

typically ISP's will flag you as a spammer if you put ALL your addresses in the BCC field with no TO. And email servers (I think) require a To: address to send the email to anyway - any example I have seen of using SMTP protocol has always put something in To. but I digress.

headers when forwarding

also, when I get one of these emails, I usually delete the chunk of header like you see below, to keep people's email adresses private. don't just forward.

From:  Joe Palooka <nobody@nowhere.com>
To: Jim Palooka <jim@nowhere.com>
Sent: Fri, March 12, 2010 12:52:29 PM
Subject: whatsits and whosits

tracking?

when I send out an email, I don't get any record back of what I sent. so I don't think you have anything to worry about in that sense, unless by some strange conincidence someone forwards it to the OP (Original Poster).

I am not an expert on MTAs. I used to attempt to run Apache James mail server once just because I wanted my own mail server and I wanted the experience. But nowadays, Cable ISP's are providing businesses with email addresses and domain emails and other business services, at a higher price, so this kind of knowledge is not necessary.

there IS something that people can do in an email which can track you. it's not a cookie, but an image. say, a 1x1 transparent GIF, or a regular image. and it depends on the image too. an attachment isn't one of those. but an embedded image probably comes from a web server and can be tracked at the web server as to where it came from, etc. if you REALLY want to do that and have the capabilities (web servers are only equipped with usage statistics like number of hits and country it came from). If you are concerned about this, in your email client, turn off viewing of images. the most they can collect is your IP address and where you are from. but they can't collect your email address.