Avoid Chain Letters - Preferences & Security



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Free yourself from chain letters and lies!
Hoaxes and chain letters promote false information. They come in all shapes and sizes, from fake virus warnings to get-rich-quick offers. Recipients are usually asked to forward these bizarre emails to everyone they know in order to find love, win a million dollars, or avoid bad luck.

In this section we help you:

Understand Chain Letters
Deal With Chain Letters

Understand Chain Letters

Chain letters aren't easy to understand. We can tell you that ICQ will not be giving you $1, 10kg of milk chocolate or a chance to enter a lottery and win $500,000 if you forward an ICQ message to everyone on your Contact List. We just don't go in for that kind of thing, and we'd be surprised if there is a company that does.

As you would expect chain letter messages vary from the amusing ("AIR, WATER, LOVE, AND ICQ SHOULD REMAIN FREE...") to the pushy ("send this to all on your list, or you will be deleted from the system...") to the downright bizarre ("YOU ARE IN TROUBLE!!!!!! Somebody is watching YOU.........").

And while it's not always clear why someone would want to forward these messages, we can faithfully assure you that we're never in collusion with the chain letter senders.
In fact, the golden rule is that ICQ staff will never ask you to send information to ICQ or to forward messages to others. When there are announcements to be made, ICQ posts them on the www.icq.com site.

Deal With Chain Letters

Long term ICQ users may have grown used to the occasional chain message, but we appreciate that anybody could be irritated or even offended by the content of these messages. So while we're not interested in restricting you from passing on fun jokes to all your friends, we would like to ask that if you receive a chain letter that you think may be baseless, insulting or even deceptive in its claims, do the following:

Don't forward it.
If you want to reply, make sure to mention that the sender sees this page: http://www.icq.com/support/security/icqlite/spam.html.
Feel free to exercise your right to block a particular sender from ever sending messages to you again by adding them to your Ignore List.

So think twice before you hit the 'forward' button, and if you receive a message that's unworthy of further distribution, send it back to the sender with the URL of this page http://www.icq.com/support/security/icqlite/spam.html.

If after all this, you still have an uncontrollable urge to forward a multiple message, we have a few more pages that we think you should see.

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