How to know if that email is true.

Have you ever received an email with some amazing store or been told to ban a product because of their attack on Christianity or that a virus named Osama vs. Bush will erase your entire hard drive if you answer the question it asks or that forwarding an email will help earn support for a little girl with cancer? Have you ever wondered if these emails are true? Quite often I've learned these emails are either hoaxes or email rumors, sometimes called urban legends.

How to spot a email rumor or hoax.

1. Note whether the text you've received was actually written by the person who sent it. Did anyone sign their name to it? If not, be skeptical.
2. Look for the telltale phrase, 'Forward this to everyone you know!' The more urgent the plea, the more suspect the message.
3. Look for statements like 'This is NOT a hoax' or 'This is NOT an urban legend.' They typically mean the opposite of what they say.
4. Watch for overly emphatic language, as well as frequent use of UPPERCASE LETTERS and multiple exclamation points!!!!!!!
5. If the text seems aimed more at persuading than informing the reader, be suspicious. Like propagandists, hoaxers are more interested in pushing people's emotional buttons than communicating accurate information.
6. If the message purports to impart extremely important information that you've never heard of before or read elsewhere in legitimate venues, be very suspicious.
7. Read carefully and think critically about what the message says, looking for logical inconsistencies, violations of common sense and blatantly false claims.
8. Look for subtle or not-so-subtle jokes — indications that the author is pulling your leg.
9. Check for references to outside sources of information. Hoaxes don't typically cite verifiable evidence, nor link to Websites with corroborating information.
10. Check to see if the message has been debunked by Websites that debunk urban legends and Internet hoaxes (see below).
11. Research any factual claims in the text to see if there is published evidence to support them. If you find none, odds are you've been the recipient of an email hoax.

Source: About: Urban Legends and Folklore


The danger of forwarding one of these emails.

If you decide to forward a potential hoax or email rumor to all your contacts, it makes available all your friends and families email addresses to just about anyone. The average person will just click forward and entire address book and then send. I seen some of these emails with loads of email addresses in them and could easily be added to someone's spamming list. It would behoove you to use the BCC option in your email message which sends a message to multiple recipients in such a way that what they receive does not contain the complete list of recipients. This can help avoiding giving your friends and families email addresses out freely, but it doesn't help the poor folks whose email addresses are already on the email, unless of course you copy and paste the main story to a new email message.

How to verify if an email is hoax, rumor, or truth.

Here are a couple websites for you to bookmark and use for the next potential email hoax or rumor comes into your inbox.

• Scambusters - Helped People Protect Themselves From Clever Internet Scams, Identity Theft and Urban Legends Since 1994
• Snopes - lots of stuff here broken down into specific categories, seems to have a lot of popups though.
• Truth or Fiction - a website to find out whether an eRumor that has been forwarded to them is true or not. My favorite email hoax and rumor site to use.

I hope this helps you eliminate some of these emails from your inboxes and outboxes. Maybe you could send a link to this post here at TGP to help others fight email hoaxes and rumors.