Email Petitions Are Useless, May Be Harmful

Email petitions are useless, annoying, and may even be harmful. They're usually about a topic that will prey on our emotions; one may promise to pay each person an amount of money if the list reaches a certain number, or urge you to let the President know your feelings about a hot political concern. It doesn't matter the nature of the petition, if it is gathering names from emails that are forwarded, it is totally ineffective.

The email might ask you to add your name and maybe city, state or other personal information then forward to everyone in your address book. Normally the person that is a predetermined number is supposed to send the petition to Microsoft or the White House or whatever the origin of the subject is. Let's take a look at why that is senseless.

Why Email Petitions Make No Sense

The person who starts the petition on the internet will have their name in slot #1, but every position after that will be filled with several names initially, and soon spiral into thousands of names for each number, rendering the whole thing pointless.

Scenario: Joe the Plumber has nothing better to do on a Saturday night so he starts an internet petition for fun, putting his name as #1 and asking all of his friends to forward it. His instructions are for person #10,000 to forward the list to the President, who supposedly promises not to raise taxes on beer and cigarettes if there are 10,000 signatures.

Joe emails it to 100 of his friends, muttering 'suckah' with an evil grin as he hits that send button. Some ignore it, but at least half of Joe's drinking buddies add their names in the #2 spot and send it on to do their part to keep the beer flowing and smoke rising at the weekly poker game.

We now have 50 people who are #2. They each send it to their 25 friends who know how to turn on a computer, and none of them know any better so they all add their name to the list. With 50 people in #2 slot each sending to 25 others, you now have 1250 clueless petitioners in the #3 position. If those people were signing a real petition, there would be one name beside each number, one list with 1250 names on it. Because it was circulated through the internet, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of petitions but each has only three names on it.

You see where this is going, don't you? By the time it gets to 10,000 names on the list, there could potentially be tens of thousands of people who think they are lucky signer #10,000, all eager to do their civic duty and forward the petition to the White House.

How SPAM Comes Into Play

Remember Joe's pals who know little about computers? They know even less about email etiquette and don't clean up the list of addresses before sending it catapulting into cyberspace. The email address that the 'final' name on the list is supposed to send it to could be an account set up by a spammer to collect data.

Spammers love Joe's friends because they've just given them thousands of email addresses, fresh meat to pitch their get-rich-quick schemes to. They're an easy target since they've already proven how gullible they are by forwarding the nonsensical petition. How many of them will be eager to send Mr I-Make-a-Million-a-Week-in-My-Spare-Time some of their hard earned money, as they envision never having to swing a hammer again?

Back to Joe. Well Joe turns out to be Sam the Scammer who sent that original email to a list he purchased from someone who harvests information from petitions and similar bogus emails floating around (yea, your name is on it because you've fallen for it before). Not only can Sam use the 100s of lists with thousands of names and email addresses for his own purposes, he can also sell the information to other unscrupulous spammers and scammers, and the cycle continues.

How to Deal With Email Petitions

The next time you get an email from Aunt Suzy with the latest email petition tugging at your heartstrings, hit the 'reply all' button instead of 'forward' and direct others to this article or any one of the dozens of others that report email petitions for the scams that they are (snopes.com is a great source).

If you think Aunt Suzy might be offended if you ask to be taken off her list of forwards, simply hit the delete key and move on. You don't want to be scratched from her gift list too.

Source: Personal observation