This e-mail was sent by a friend, and it appears to make two common mistakes.

My friend put the names of 41 people on the To: line

This exposes everyone to spammers. When you send e-mail to people who do not know each other (I knew only five of those listed), put all the names on the Bcc: line. Find out how.

My friend appears to have forwarded a scam e-mail message

How can you tell for sure from reading an e-mail that it is making a legitimate claim? You can’t. (This the main reason you should NEVER click on a link in e-mail like this unless you first verify that it is trustworthy.)

To find out if an e-mail claim is legitimate or not, I go to Snopes.com and look it up. Snopes lets you search its site by category or by typing in a phrase. In this case I typed animal rescue and found that the claim is true.

The lessons learned? Don’t expose your friends and always check before you click a link or forward to others.

Linda