SPAM - gotta hate it. How to cut it back... Advice from SNOPES

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This is an article I got in my e-mail that apparently was taken from Snopes. I know we all know think we know and have ways to avoid it, but I found this really interesting, so I thought I would share it here. Check it out: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/internet.htm Just a word to the wise. E-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any 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 info for tele-marketers and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own purposes. Any time you see an e-mail that says forward this on to "10" of your friends, sign this pe tition, or you'll get good luck, or whatever, 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 and then is able to get lists of "active" e-mails to use in spam e-mails, or sell to others that do. (If you have been sending out the above kinds of email, now you know why you get so much spam! If you don't send this to your friends by e-mail, you could be saving yourself thousands of SPAM mails.)