From Snopes.com

DID YOU KNOW:

E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other municipality.
To be acceptable, petitions must have a signed signature and full address.
Same with 'prayer chains' -- be wary!

Almost all e-mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are
similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards
to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records
for the most cards.
All it was, and all this type of e-mail is, is to get names and 'cookie' tracking
information for telemarketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts
for their own purposes.
(If you have been sending out the above kinds of email, now you know why
you get so much spam!)
HOW TO PREVENT JUNK, SPAM E-MAILS:
1) Any time you see an e-mail that says forward this on to 'TEN' of your friends,
" sign this petition," or "you'll get good luck", or what ever, it has either an e-mail
tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you
forward to, or the host sender is getting a copy. Each time it gets forwarded,
then it's able to get lists of 'active' e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to
others that do.
2) Add this as the first entry of your address book:
AAAAalert AND for the e-mail address enter this: WORMALERTVIRUS@somewhere.com
IF anyone tries to capture your address book, they will hit a brick wall.
DO IT NOW!! None of your addresses will be available, since the first one stops everything.

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