FROM MY EMAIL: some advice about 'punching back twice as hard' when spammers come calling:

1) Any time you see an email that says "forward this on to '10' (or however many) of your friends", "sign this petition", or "you'll get bad luck" or "you'll get good luck" or "you'll see something funny on your screen after you send it" or whatever --- it almost always has an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward to. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of 'active' email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other Spammers. Even when you get emails that demand you send the email on if you're not ashamed of God/Jesus --- that is email tracking, and they are playing on our conscience. These people don't care how they get your email addresses - just as long as they get them. Also, emails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease "how would you feel if that was your child" --- email tracking. Ignore them and don't participate!

2) Almost all emails 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 who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards. All it was, and all any of this type of email is, is a way to get names and 'cookie' tracking information for telemarketers and Spammers -- to validate active email accounts for their own profitable purposes.

3) Email petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress of any other organization - I.e. Social security, etc. To be acceptable, petitions must have a "signed signature"and full address of the person signing the petition, so this is a waste of time and you are just helping the email trackers.

Tips for Handling Telemarketers:

1) Say 'Hold On, Please...' while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately). Then go back and hang up when you eventually hear the phone company's 'beep-beep-beep' tone. This makes each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales will grind to a halt if they continue to call.

2) Those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end are a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a 'real' sales person to call back and get someone at home. After answering, immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call, and it kicks your number out of their system.

Junk Mail Help:

1) When you get 'ads' enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these 'ads' with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away. For junk mail with postage-paid return envelopes, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes.

2) Let's help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that's why they need to increase postage costs again.

Save your sanity and help these folks go out of business sooner rather than later.