Also known as "Urban Legends," "Faxlore," and in some rare cases just flat out scams, hoaxes are the second most discouraging aspect of electronic mail proliferation, next to spam.

Email hoaxes work something like this: You recieve an electronic message to your address which was forwarded to you by a friend, work associate, or perhaps randomly (like spam). The message in question alerts you to an amazing or extraordinary event, which usually appears to have dire consequences if you don't take action and assist in the efforts by forwarding the message to everyone you know and spreading the knowledge.

This is a little different from "get rich quick" schemes or unsolicited commercial advertising via email. Spams are purposefully engineered to accomplish an ulterior motive. Email hoaxes are usually more direct and to the point, and also usually have a sense of urgency to them.

The origins of email hoaxes are generally less vindictive or unscrupulous than spam. Here is where the comparison between spam and hoaxes generally end. With email hoaxes, there is rarely someone who will benefit directly from the success of people falling for it, and in many cases the original message which the hoax is based on does have some validity, or at least did at one time.

Example - Little Girl Missing

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Subject: Fwd: Fwd: URGENT: missing child

Date: Today, XX Now 1999 12:44:58 PST

I am asking you all, begging you to please forward this email on to anyone and everyone. I have a 5-year-old daughter named Kelsey Brooke Jones. We are from Southern Minnesota. She has been missing since 4pm Oct.11,1999. The police were notified shortly after.

If anyone anywhere knows anything, sees anything, please contact me if you have my number. The police don't recommend I put my number online, but you can contact the Police, at missing persons. A report has been filed. I am including a picture of her. All prayers are appreciated!!

Thank you,

Amy

Heart wrenching, isn't it? Someone sends you a message like this and you can't help but want to get involved, can you? I did some research and found out the truth to this message. "Amy Jones" is alive and well and her daughter Kelsey is also safe, at least last I heard. Around October 10th of this year, Amy woke from a nap, looked around for her little girl and couldn't find her anywhere in the apartment. Exasperated, she called the police. They immediately did a preliminary search of the area, which is one of the first things the police are trained to do in cases like this, and found Kelsey a few doors down the street visiting neighbors.

A sincere tip of the hat to the Minnesota PD for a job well done. All in a day's work and they thought it was over. Amy simply had neglected to check the neighborhood herself, thinking her daughter would never have left the apartment.

Kelsey was never officially declared a 'missing person' so there were no missing persons reports filed on her by the police. She was from her mother's side less than a few hours, and was never in any real danger. However, Amy may have composed that message herself sometime after she called the police but before they actually found her daughter with friends.

There's speculation there, because those who I learned this information from were unable to speak directly to Amy. There's no clear indication how the actual message got onto the Internet. Also, a day or two later there were other messages indicating that the situation was more serious than it had been, that the police discovered the child had been kidnapped by a retarded person. Very curious. It's at that point that the truth and the email hoax itself begins to divide.

As such cries for help often do on the Internet, Amy's initial plea spread like wildfire. Each time an individual recieved it, they would foward-blast it on to twenty of their closest friends, who in turn would do the same thing.

Corporate email servers have been known to cave in and crash over something like this. I'm not exagerrating.

I know this will be difficult for some of you to swallow, but please take this to heart. 90% of the time, when you are asked to forward something on to everyone you know, there is no logical and rational reason for you to do so. And were you to actually research the missive and find out about its validity, you would know that.

However, to research email hoaxes would take time. You can't just write back to the person who forwarded it to you. He doesn't know anything more than you do. Just that someone else sent it to him, and they got it from someone else. Most of the time you can't even trace it back that far.

Email hoaxes appear to be real. Sometimes they are, or rather were at the time they were made. This makes them even more dangerous because a regular recipient of such hoaxes will become jaded. The tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf comes to mind. How can we take any electronic mail at face value if so many of them are untruthful.

I got news for ya: email is not news. It's not regulated in any way, shape or form. So unless you personally know the person you are receiving the message from, you should always take all email with a grain of salt. And if a close friend of yours forwards something from another source, take that at the face value of a three dollar bill too. After all, your forwarding friend could have just been suckered. He means well, but he didn't check up on the facts.

You can. I ask you to take the following suggestions to heart. They will make your use of email more enjoyable in the long run, will lessen the chances of annoying or angering friends and coworkers, and the more people who take these steps, the cleaner and healthier overall email proliferation will be.

1. Don't Get Schnookered - Forwarding every message that says "please forward me" is fool-hardy. Even if your intent and the intent of those who sent it to you is genuine, it can and in the past has had negative consequences. You are not helping a complete stranger by passing information you are uncertain about on to twenty other people who are strangers to the one who originally sent the missive. You may think it is just a drop in the bucket, but on the Internet those drops can add up pretty fast. You may mean well, but when you add the pros and cons, it is never advantageous to forward a message to twenty of your closest friends when you don't have all the answers.
2. Get the Skinny - Okay, so despite what I just said, you're staring at this email message someone sent you and you feel you must do something. What if it's not a hoax? There are ways you can research that without even getting up off your chair. Urban Legends Reference Pages is one of my first ports of call whenever I get an unfamiliar email forwarded my way. It's also an entertaining read. About.Com has a very extensive and useful reference tool for most of the diehard email hoaxes and some of the newer ones, and between those two you can find other sources to help you ascertain whether or not a particular story sent your way is accurate or not. Another quick way to search is to take the Subject Line of the message sent you, remove the "FWD:"s and "RE:"s and copypaste it into any number of search engines available on the Web. With practice, you'll find the level of validity to a particular email within fifteen minutes.
3. Do The Legwork - Nine times out of ten, by the time I get an email message, the above links and others already have information out on the 'Net about it. There are people who make it a hobby or a personal vendetta to investigate these stories and get to the bottom of it, then they report it to the rest of us. However, there are rare cases when I recieve something in the mail and I can't find any information about it on the 'Net at all. What to do?
   
   • First you piece through the email itself and try to discern a way to contact the person who originally sent it.
   • If you can't find a way to verify the information from its primary source, see if you can ascertain the location in which the event described is supposed to have occurred.
   • If you don't mind the long distance, call the police department in that area, or look up the police resources on the Web and see if you can find an email address or webspace from which to get more information about the area and the event described.
   • Or perhaps the email is sincerely warning and alerting you to some allegedly unfair business practices by a certain company, or hazardous environmental concerns due to the neglect of corporate interests. Call the company being slandered directly and ask them (politely) if the allegations are true. Get the answer straight from the horse's mouth, whenever possible.

And finally, Free Yourself From Guilt - Let me let you in on the secret to all this. You're a busy person. You receive a message calling for help or asking for action to be taken. You don't have time to be a hero. It takes too much work. The message in question is about something that takes place on one side of the world and you're on the other. How can you help? You can't. About the only thing you have time to do is forward the message on. At least you can do that much.

That's what this is about. There's a guilt factor involved.

We recieve a message asking for help, and instead of actively seeking out the person in need, we think we can help by passing the buck on to someone else. Unconsciously, we're off the hook. We did something, even though rationally and logically, forwarding the message really does nothing at all.

You rationalize it. You think, "well, I can't do anything about it but maybe one of my twenty closest friends can." So you pass the buck. You reliquish the responsibility thrust upon your shoulders and pass it on to someone else.

Some people act as if every email plea for help is like being a witness to an accident. Two complete strangers run into each other, and the only thing you have in common with these people is that you happened to be looking at both of them when it happened. You don't want to be there. You weren't responsible for the accident. However you witnessed it. The police may want to question you. Maybe one of the people in the accident is hurt and you can help. How do you respond to this? Does it make you a bad person if you just walk away?

Email hoaxes are NOT like that. They're just words on a page. If they instigate in you a call to action, utilize your time and energy in a way that will actually make a difference. Get involved. Don't just pass the buck.

If you can't personally take the time to be involved, passing it on to your twenty closest friends is even more cold hearted of you. If you really honestly can't be bothered, just delete the message. Please. Believe me, you'll be doing yourself and the rest of the Internet world a favor by just not getting in the way.

If you can't sleep at night, then start taking steps to change your life to insure that next time you will have time to make a difference. Start researching those emails as soon as you see them. If they're hoaxes, you'll walk away feeling like a smarter person that you didn't get schnookered this time. If the email turns out to be TRUE, and you've researched the issue enough to get access to the primary or secondary sources of the information, THEN you are in a much better position to get involved and help. Then you will be able to do so much more than passing the buck.