McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

Kids of all ages will send millions of good-humored e-cards to the e-mail inboxes of mothers across America this May 14th. Thinking about sending an e-card to your mother this year? Sons and daughters beware. Choose the wrong Web site, and your inbox could receive dozens, hundreds, even a thousand unwanted e-mails long after Mother’s Day.

E-Cards became popular alternatives to paper greeting cards in the 90s. What an e-card lacks in old fashioned, tactile pleasure, it makes up for with music, animation and interactivity. According to the Greeting Card Association, Americans send approximately 420 million e-cards every year, making Mother’s Day the third busiest holiday for the greeting card business, after Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

Search for e-cards using SiteAdvisor’s browser plug-in, and you’ll find the majority of e-card sites get green ratings. But there are enough risky sites out there that users ought to take caution. Searching for “mother’s day card,” below yielded two red rated sites on the first page of results. Clicking randomly on the page would send the user to an unsafe site 10% of the time.

Use Caution Here

Here are ten e-card sites to stay away from this Mother’s Day (and any other day, for that matter). Links go to respective SiteAdvisor site details pages.

2000greetings.com
When we signed up here, our inbox filled up with subject lines touting offers from major national advertisers like JC Penney, Tiffany, and Overstock.

fun-e-cards.com
Get the joke? Fun… e-cards… funny e-cards. SiteAdvisor hates to be a killjoy, but there was nothing fun about the 29 spammy e-mails per week we received after we signed up.

freewebcards.com
Unless your mother needs a tax refund, auto loan or credit card, go elsewhere for your e-card. Those offers were among the 36 e-mails we got each week after signing up here.

funsilly.com
After we signed up here, we received 50 e-mails per week. One promised to tell us “How to Have a Happy Life.” Our best suggestion: Avoid Web sites like this.

funnyreign.com
Funnyreign reigns as one of the highest volume, non-adult Web sites in SiteAdvisor’s vast database. Our e-mail sign-up received an incredible 1,075 messages per week, on average.

fukkad.com
This aggregator of light-hearted material (jokes, quotes, poems, etc.) used an Active X prompt to install Roings adware, IMIServer and TargetSaver during one of our test visits. (links go to respective McAfee Web threat definition pages)

celebwelove.com
Searching for a celebrity-themed e-card for Mother’s Day might bring you to Celebwelove.com, but how long you stay depends on where you click. Affiliation analysis of this site shows that users are re-directed to other red rated sites, often without their knowledge.

eforu.com
This site provides greeting cards, as well as celebrity photos and a joke directory. It also attempted to install malicious software on our machine without our consent.

ecard4all.com
More Active X badness here. Similar to our visit to fukkad.com, ecard4all left our test machine with Roings and IMIserver.

myfuncards.com
This heavily trafficked e-card site requires users to download a “free” toolbar in order to access 1,000 e-cards. The toolbar includes unrelated items like Smiley Central, Cursor Mania, Popular Screensavers, the MyWebSearch search box and Search Assistant. There are easier ways to make Mom happy.

So What’s A Son Or Daughter To Do?

As in most categories we’ve tested, there are safe e-card sites. In fact, many of the best known and most popular e-card sites tested safe and offer a selection of free cards. However, these e-card players reserve the best material for their paid subscribers. Links go to respective greeting card sites.

AmericanGreetings.com
American Greetings and its subsidiaries, BlueMountain.com and EGreetings.com, account for 275 million unique visitors a year from around the world. Each site has a different pricing structure (from $14-$20 annually).

Hallmark.com
The well-known greeting card company has a free selection of Mother’s Day e-cards that can be accessed from their front page.

123greetings.com
Mother’s Day cards with titles like “Have A Bee-utiful Day” and “You’re Berry Berry Special.”

WorldWildlife.org
Non-profits and activist groups also offer free cards. E-Cards from the World Wildlife Fund feature wild animals or magical sea creatures and sometimes send not so subtle messages to donate.