It all sounds so important...a missing girl, a cancer patient that will receive a penny per forwarded e-mail, a house burned down by a glade plug-in...but the fact is that none of it is true.
Any time you receive an e-mail that says "forward this to..." you can almost be certain that the e-mail is a hoax perpetuated by some bored writer somewhere at best or by the competition of a commercial product (such as the Glade plugin house fire).
I highly recommend checking sites such as www.hoax-slayer.com or http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org to see if the e-mail you just received is a hoax. You can even do a simple Google search with a few words from the e-mail to see if it pops up as a hoax. If the e-mail truly is a hoax, instead of forwarding it on reply to the sender and encourage them to visit this page to learn more about internet hoaxes.
The problem with hoaxes is not just that they're a mild annoyance in your inbox; millions of e-mailed hoaxes clog up e-mail servers by slowing them down and taking up valuable space.
Another problem is that most people simply click on "forward" and begin typing in addresses, giving each addressee the address of a few to a few dozen other valid e-mail accounts. Eventually these e-mail addresses will end up in the hands of a spammer who will assault the addressee with spam.
If you feel some primal urge to forward the e-mail, here's a tip: use the BCC (blind carbon copy) feature of your e-mail. Put your own e-mail address in the "To" section and then place everyone else's e-mail in the "BCC" (not "To" or "CC (Carbon Copy)" section.
This prevents each addressee from receiving dozens of valid e-mail addresses. I also recommend cleaning the e-mail when you forward it on; if the e-mail lists different e-mail addresses within the e-mail itself (as many do) delete them when you forward the e-mail.
Again, the purpose is to "clean" the e-mail of usable e-mail addresses.
The following are ALL examples of hoaxes:
- No girl was just kidnapped and her dad is not using the internet to send around her picture hoping that someone has seen her.
- The government is not about to tax or add a fee for e-mailing
- You do not need to boycott Starbucks becasue of some Marine somewhere
- The person writing you from India, Turkey, Africa or some country you've never heard of is NOT trying to move money - they just want your bank account numbers.
- If you didn't enter the Canadian (or whichever country the e-mail specifies) you did not win. Furthermore, no lottery requires you to send them money before they send it to you.
- Nobody - not IBM, not AOL, not Microsoft - nobody can possibly track e-mails for any reason.
- Nobody will be giving anyone pennies for forwarded e-mails
- No financial instution (PayPal included) will ever send you an e-mail saying "Dear (financial institution member) - we need you to verify your account number. If you're unsure, type in the web address for the financial institution yourself (many of these types of e-mails include fake web addresses that can easily fool people into giving out their account numbers).
- If an eBay member sends you a check and asks for a refund of the balance, don't do it. It's a fake check and you'll be stuck with the bill.
- Use your common sense! If the e-mail doesn't look quite right, don't believe it. If it looks like it may be legit, run a search on the text or subject matter of the e-mail to see if it is a hoax.
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