Hoax Checking

I dislike email hoaxes. Really dislike them.
This post is to give some information to try to cut down on the number of email hoaxes that get forwarded.

Before you:
Delete any files (some, even just one, would render your computer inoperable)
Forward that latest email about the latest virus or a sick child's wish.
Forward emails to "get rich (or get anything) if you forward this"
or
Pass along some fabulous recipe

Check out the following web sites. It just might be a hoax.
Great site http://www.urbanlegends.com/
Great site http://www.truthorfiction.com/
Great site http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
Good site http://www.truthminers.com/
Good site http://vmyths.com/hoax.cfm
Good site http://urbanlegends.about.com/mbody.htm
Good site http://www.breakthechain.org/
Good site http://www.europe.datafellows.com/news/hoax.htm
Seems to be ok http://www.snopes2.com/
Fair site http://www.nonprofit.net/hoax/default.htm

Another good tactic is go to a good search engine such as http://www.google.com/, then go to Advanced search, and type in a main phrase of the email.

How to Recognize a Hoax
Probably the first thing you should notice about a warning is the request to "send this to everyone you know" or some variant of that statement. This should raise a red flag that the warning is probably a hoax. No real warning message from a credible source will tell you to send this to everyone you know.

Next, look at what makes a successful hoax. There are two known factors that make a successful hoax, they are:
(1) technical sounding language.
(2) credibility by association.

Before you go to those sites you can know that any email which promises to give you money or gift certificates or ANYTHING for forwarding emails is a hoax. These typically go like this - Synopsis of message: Somebody will give you some money if you forward their email some specific number of times. Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Also, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
A phone/beer/clothing/entertainment company will send you one of its products free if you forward their email some number of times.
A charity will receive some money if their email is forwarded some specific number of times
Hoaxes along these lines have been spread about Bill Gates (money, software), Disney (vacations), IBM (computers), Miller (beer), The Gap (clothing), Nokia and Ericsson (phone handsets), Neiman Marcus (cookies) and Cracker Barrel ($50 gift certificate).
Why are these hoaxes? It is impossible to track an email as it's forwarded. The Internet email system works in a way which makes tracking email forwarding impossible. For one of the hoaxes to be true, internet email would have to do one of the following:
(a) All internet email, no matter what the starting and finishing points, would have to pass through (or at least be registered at) a central point.
(b) Your email software would have to somehow know the starting-point of every forwarding chain and send a message to it every time you forward that email.
The Internet is not built around a central computer: there's no 'hub' or 'center of the net' which everything has to pass through. If someone in Florida sends email to someone else in Florida, that email may never go outside Florida. If someone in France emails someone in Germany, that email is unlikely to ever go near Florida. There can be no way to count how many times a message has moved from one person to another because there's no collection-point for traffic information.
Hundreds of people and companies have written email software. As long as the software conforms to the Internet standard it will be able to receive and send email. The standard does not mention any way of noting the origin of a message once it has been forwarded. If Alice sends an email to Bob, there's nothing she can put in her message to order Bob's software to tell her if Bob forwards her message. Even if the original message is sent using a special piece of software (as one of the Microsoft versions of this hoax suggests), there's no way of controlling what software Bob uses to read or send his email.

The content of this post may be copied and forwarded as many times as you wish, however you won't get anything for doing it, except perhaps the satisfaction of cutting down on some of the hoaxes being forwarded. (A good technique to use when sending out an email that you DO want to send to a large group of people is to use the BCC [Blind Courtesy Copy], that way no one sees the other recipients.)