If you’ve ever had an email address and have given that email address to family members and friends, then you’ve been the victim of FW: otherwise know as a email forward, chain letter, or some funny video, story, joke, etc. These type of emails are some of the worst emails to perpetuate, for a number of reasons.

Unless you believe that being gullible is a good thing and you want everyone you know to also believe anything anyone will say, then go ahead and continue passing on those emails to 10, 20, 100, or a million people so that your wildest dreams will come true, or so that you won’t have every single bad thing possible in the world happen to you…hey, it’s what the email said, right? (FW: Cute Story, Pass it on to 1 Billion People in the next 5 minutes OR ELSE!!!)

So you may ask, why are these emails sent so often? Is it just because someone something interesting to share and it continues to be perpetuated? No, I’m afraid not, if you believe that, you’re skating towards the gullible crowd.

Email like this and others are ultimately generated and sent out by spammers for one of two general purposes. First, to harvest new email addresses for spamming. and second, to clog email systems all over the world.

Spammers don’t make money from people buying the products advertised in the spam email. Spammers usually aren’t the one selling the products. Spammers are hired by shady companies to deliver the company’s advertisement to the greatest number of people possible. The spammer is then paid by the company per number of successful email deliveries of the advertisement.

So ask yourself, if a spammer had to get a very large number of VALID and ACTIVE email addresses (remember, they only get paid if the spam email is safely delivered to an email address, rejected emails don’t count), how would you go about it? Searching online? Too time consuming. Randomly guessing email addresses? Not guaranteed to get active email addresses. Email forwards are a spammers dream. In any given email forward, you can find anywhere from 25 to hundreds of valid and active email addresses, and they are guaranteed because when you forward it to your friends and they send it on to their friends, it perpetuates this cycle of sending the forward to valid email addresses.

Every time a forward is sent, the previous email addresses specified in the email are sent in the message so after a couple of rounds you find the joke or story of the email at the bottom of the message after scrolling through hundreds of email addresses.

Now imagine this giant email message being sent to 25-100 people everytime you forward and copy your entire hotmail or yahoo address book. Then each of those individuals does the same. After a couple of rounds, the giant message is being delivered to thousands and thousands of email inboxes all over the world. As a one time email administrator, I can assure you that email servers don’t like giant messages, they don’t work well and bog down the mail delivery process. Another sick pleasure of spammers and other Web sadists, to cause as many problems for servers and administrators all over the world.

So next time you get one of these messages, please don’t forward it. Trust me, you won’t get that $10. And if you really want to read some funny jokes and cute stories, that’s what search engines are for, just search: “cute story” or “funny jokes”. You’ll get much more than you would from that email. Then, reply to the person who sent you the forwarded message and kindly ask them to never include your email address in another message like that because it’s just a way for spammers to gain access to your email address. Hopefully they will respect your wishes and will be sure to never do it again. If all else fails, create a brand new email address and don’t share it with anyone, that’s always a safe bet.