How to avoid sending Jhoos invitations to certain address(es)

Recently, we have had church members sending Jhoos invitations to the Portoroki Church’s mailing list with or without their knowledge. I am pretty sure though that members who have sent these invitations to the list have done so without knowing it. Therefore, in this post, I would like to let you all know a little bit about Jhoos and how you can avoid sending those invitations to the Church’s mailing list.

What is Jhoos?
Well, from the Jhoos website, Jhoos is:

“… a free online dating service. No subscription fees and lifetime membership with text and audio video chat features.

Jhoos is a human edited profiles repository where participating members evaluate profiles thereby making Jhoos a social network of live dating personals. Easy to install and free to use. Jhoos makes online adult dating easy and fun.

Jhoos is a professional online dating messenger that integrates with Yahoo and AIM and lets you search and date millions of singles and activity partners all over the globe.”

How can you avoid sending Jhoos invitations?
Well firstly, you need to know that Jhoos works with Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AIM. If you have an email account with any of these Internet Email Providers (IEP), Jhoos can easily gain access to your contact list. However, because these IEP’s must stick to the world wide web’s rule of ethics, they can’t gain access to your contact list unless you allow them to. And most of the time, people allow this access without realizing it.

So let us suppose that one morning as you are checking your emails, you come across a naughty email with a title that runs similar to “dummyuser has invited you to join Jhoos!” A link is provided in the email for you to click on so that you can join this worldwide dating network.

Let’s say that out of curiosity, you click on the link. You are directed to a page that is urging you to find out which of your friends are already using Jhoos!

It then asks for your First Name and Last Name. Under these it asks for you to provide your username for either Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail or AIM. (I suspect that most of the members of the Portoroki mailing list use Gmail.) So you go right ahead and type in your username (which is ok as far as individual rights go). Then beside the username box is another box asking you to type in your password. Without much consideration, you type in your password (which is also ok as far as individual rights are concerned).

However, this is the part which I should warn you about. When you provide your username and password, you are giving Jhoos access rights to your Gmail contact list. If you click “Continue” after providing your username and password, you are directed to a page that lists down all your contacts in Gmial. Now be reminded that as far as individual rights go, you have the right to allow or restrict access to your Gmail contact list. However, you don’t have the right to send any sort of fancy internet invitation to anyone unless of course you know that they will approve.

Therefore, when you arrive at the page which lists down your Gmail contacts, you’ll notice that all the contacts are checked. Now, your Gmail contact list contains ALL the email addresses that you’ve ever sent emails to. And that includes the Portoroki Mailing List. How do you select some email addresses and deselect the others?

You can do it the long way by going down the list and deselecting those you don’t want to send the invitation to, or you scroll right to the bottom and click on the checkbox beside Select All/Deselect All. All the addresses will be unchecked, then scroll up and check only those addresses which you’d like to send an invitation to. (This way, you won’t “accidentally” send the Jhoos invitation to the Portoroki Mailing List.) You can then click on “Next >” and be on your way.

Please note that when you arrive on the page that lists down your contacts, DO NOT just click on “Next >”. Take time to choose only the addresses of people whom you know will approve of your Jhoos invitation notice.

Advice?
My advice to you all is that when you receive a Jhoos invitation in your inbox, just delete it and spend your time doing something better.