First Published: March 27, 2006
Updated: December 27, 2006This article takes a quick look at
the harm introduced by multi-generation forwarding.
- The percentage indicates the % of recipients who in-turn forward
to others.
- The columns represent the average number of recipients in
forward mailing list.
- The rows represent the recipients of each generation
(non-cumulative) of forwarding.
- For example:
- If 10% forward to 15 others, the 9th generation alone reaches
1,123, with a cumulative total reach of 3,081 people.
- If 20% forward to 30 others, after 9 generations, the message reaches/bothers over
72 million people! And, if BCC wasn't used by everyone at every
level, the email addresses are potentially exposed to the same 72
millions!
The implications
- The tremendous reaching power or crushing "bugging" power.
- Risk of address harvested by compromised machines and/or
malicious persons down stream.
- Privacy violation:
- disclosure of name-email association.
- disclosure of social/business/political association.
- Burden of delivering by the ISPs:
- each piece must be repeatedly transmitted to each individual
recipient.
- the collective space required to store the tens of millions of
copies.
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The Recommendations
- Don't!
- If you must, be extremely selective with your forwarding
mailing list.
- Periodically re-evaluate and prune your list.
- Formally make it an opt-in list, or at least actively
solicit opt-out.
- Always use BCC.
To/CC are reserved for small groups of closely related
members requiring full interaction and disclosure only!
This rule is mandatory!
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See Also:
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