I received an email from a friend, telling me to stop buying gas from Exxon and Mobil. I trashed it, not because it is a bad idea, and not because I am a gas junky lacking in community spirit, but mainly because this type of email is spam.

The email contains a fairly credible suggestion to save the world from $4 gas, ie boycott Exxon and Mobil for a year rather than stop buying gas for one day. What's the problem with that idea? Nothing much, but if you scroll to the end of the email, you will see a link to a 3rd party site. This site will benefit from the same numbers of eyeballs alluded to in the anti-gas email (if 10 friends of 10 friends get the email, and before you know it, 300 million will get the message.)

Ironically, in this case, you get taken to a Used car site.



I picked up on this trend when I received a circular begging for help to find Madeleine McCann, the little English girl missing in Portugal last year. Some one managed to get their link included on the end of the email message that went international, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they got a lot of click-throughs on the back of honest folks spreading the word about her sad predicament, bastards.

So, to raise awareness of this sort of subtle spam, what I suggest is that you forward this Pisstakers article to 10 friends, tell them to forward it to 10 friends, and before you know it, 300 million people will know never to forward anything to anyone, ever. That should make people think twice about using the internet to communicate!