Oh wow! You checked your email today and you just received the funniest joke ever! You MUST forward this one to all your friends on your email list because you just know they are going to die laughing when they read that joke, right? So you enter ALL your friends email addresses into the TO: field of your email application, hit SEND, and away it goes. This seems innocent enough, right? But did you know that this is one of the ways SPAM gets distributed through the internet? Email addresses entered in the TO: field can be seen by EVERYONE that you forward your message to. These messages can end up on systems that are frequently scanned by spam bots looking for new email addresses to send their junk mail to.

To help your friends avoid SPAM the correct way to forward messages is to enter YOUR email address in the TO: field and then enter your friend’s addresses in the BCC: field . The BCC: field is the ‘blind carbon copy’ field and the email addresses entered in that field are hidden when you forward that message on to others.

So, the next time you get that ‘funniest joke ever’, or that cute adorable picture of that puppy you just can’t resist sending to EVERYONE on your email list, do them all a big favor and BCC your friends instead. It will prevent them from getting SPAM and will make them appreciate your jokes, pictures, etc, a whole lot more!