Avoid Email Hoaxes

Have you received an e-mail saying that you will be paid money from Bill Gates if you just forward the e-mail to everybody you know? Or maybe some poor child dying of cancer wanted his/her e-mail to be forwarded to as many people as possible before he/she died? Maybe you want to hurt the oil companies by being part of an one day boycott? Have you received the e-mail equivalent of a 'Chain Letter' where it promises good luck for you if you forward it, and bad luck if you don't? If any of this sounds familiar to you than you have probably received an e-mail hoax, probably from somebody you even trust.

Here are some definitions for 'hoax':

1. An act intended to deceive or trick.
2. Something that has been established or accepted by fraudulent means.
3. A deception for mockery or mischief; a deceptive trick or story; a practical joke.
4. To deceive by a story or a trick, for sport or mischief; to impose upon sportively.

There are many e-mail hoaxes flying around the Internet. They may seem harmless at first, but if you factor in the few minutes each persons spends reading a hoax, and worse yet forwarding it to others who will waste time on it, it becomes quite expensive.

That is just on the human end, on the machine end each of those e-mails take up space and resources and at a minimum cause some minor degradation to the affected e-mail systems, at worst it can use up enough resources on the email server to bring it down which can cause all kinds of problems and expenses to get it back up (and there will also be some e-mails that will not ever come through that were sent while the server was down).

These hoaxes use forms of social engineering to not only get people to believe in the hoax, but also to make people want to do something about (i.e. sending it to everybody in their e-mail address book).

Here is the main sign that the e-mail is a hoax:

• It asks you to send it to everybody you know.
  This is the first best indicator that the e-mail is a hoax.

If you are not sure if the e-mail is a hoax, here are several sites that you can go to that you can look up information on current hoaxes, past hoaxes, and viruses:

• Snopes
• Computer Virus Myths - not limited to viruses
• David Spalding's Korova Multimedia "e-v-mail" site
• Urban Legends and Folklore

If you look into each of the e-mails up that ask you to forward them, you will probably find that most (if not all) of them are hoaxes. Then you won't (or shouldn't) forward it to anybody else. Then you won't be wasting any more of your time or that of your friends and associates in your address book. Nor will you look like a gullible rube.