Don't give that site your password!

Did you join one of the 'social networks'? If you did join one, did you give the site the login and password to your email account?

Why?

Did you give the site that information because it asked for it? If you don't know by now that is not a very good idea, then I will tell you why you need to keep your email private.

You need to know what happens when you give that 'social network' your login and password. They are going to 'spam' everyone in your address book by sending them an 'invitation to join this social network. This invitation will be sent to any business address, your boss (that could be very embarrassing!), every contact you have in your address book. This may include the owner/moderators for Yahoo Groups/other lists and can get you removed from the group/list! Owner/moderators really don't want to join your social network and don't appreciate the spam/invitation.

I suspect you probably didn't know that was going to happen, but in fact it did.

Now comes another question. What will that site do with all those email addresses it just added to their email address database? You do know spammers pay big bucks for email addresses, don't you?

Now just in case you didn't know all this and think you may want your friends to join you on that social site, most of them have an option for you to just add the email addresses manually. You might want to ask them first though, just in case they don't want their email address to be added to a potential spammers' list.

Think about it, giving someone access to your email is just not a good idea. Who knows what could happen if someone in charge of that database turns rogue and decides to 'have some fun' with your email account!