There are countless random emails floating around–forwarded from person to person to person–from pleas to send greeting cards to help a dying boy get into the Guinness Book of World Records to scary emails about cancer or random violence. (Oh, and don’t forget the get rich quick schemes!) Most of these emails cause an immediate reaction, because they’re meant to grab you with sympathy, fear, or greed. The problem is that although they sound convincing, they’re almost always fake.
But how can you be sure? It would take a lot of work to learn the truth about each and every one of these, but luckily there’s someone out there who has done it for us: Snopes. Here are some examples:
The dying boy wanting to get into the Guinness Book? Actually, that started as a true story but he made his world record years ago and doesn’t need any more cards; yet the email still circulates. This has been going on for TWENTY years!
How about warnings that opening an email from a particular sender will allow a hacker access to your computer? Wrong. It’s a hoax that has been going around for at least a year.
An email warning about “Inflammatory Breast Cancer?” Turns out, sadly, that this one is true.
In general, you should greet any email forward that plays directly on your emotions with a large degree of skepticism. Don’t forward them to others without first investigating, and Snopes should be your first–and probably last–stop. I’ve never run across a forwarded email that Snopes has not already investigated and answered, although sometimes they have to conclude that a particular claim is “unclassifiable.”
If, after investigating, you find that the subject of the email is actually true (such as the IBC example above), there’s nothing wrong with forwarding it to people who you feel would benefit from the information. But please don’t forward it to every person you’ve ever known.
On the other hand, if you find out it’s false–a much more likely outcome–then please, please just delete it and let at least one email spark die out.
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My rule of thumb when I encounter a forwarded email is “everything in a forwarded email is a lie.”
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