Check Your Sources

We all get them, those ever exciting e-mails stating there could be a large check payable to you for forwarding an e-mail, horror stories of mall or parking lot attacks, and ways you can contract diseases by putting your finger in the coin return of machines.

Some of us recognize these e-mails for what they are. I am hoping a few more people will learn.

E-mail is so easy to send and pass, on that the average person receives 50 to 100 e-mails a day. A lot of the e-mail consists of spam and advertisements. A small portion are useful e-mails. The rest is quite often a mix of silly photos that have been around the world a couple dozen times, chain e-mails or the "warning" and "special incentive" e-mails.

I have to be honest, when I get one of these from a friend or family member, the first thing I think is you can't be serious? The second thing that runs through my mind is I can't believe so-and-so could have been so caught up in this e-mail story, that they actually believed it enough to forward it on.

When you get one of these "Very Important - Please Read" sort of e-mails, check out the facts before you send it to your entire address book. It doesn't matter if it came from the sister of the cousin of a friend who you knew in high school 20 years ago. It doesn't matter if the story references Major Captain Man, "well-known" representative to the head of all knowing things of the world.

Go to a website like Snopes. Type in some key words for the e-mail. Sometimes it is as easy as typing in the e-mail subject line. Find the e-mail referenced and read.

Nine times out of ten you will find that the e-mail is completely false. As a bonus, you will often learn some interesting information as to how this rumor started. Plus, you will start to recognize the less then accurate e-mails within the first couple of sentences.

Occasionally you will get an e-mail that is only partially false, in which case you have the benefit of knowing exactly what is fact and what is fiction.

Much less often you will run across an e-mail that is true. In which case, you also will learn some interesting facts via Snopes or whatever other website you choose to use. Then you can forward the e-mail on to your heart's content.

You can even show your friends how reliable your e-mail is by stating that this e-mail has been verified by website such-and-such. No guarantees that in real life you won't still be gullible enough to fall victim to your friends tricks or have random blonde moments, but it's a start.