Of email hoaxes

One of my relatives recently received email warning that cell phone numbers would be released to telemarketers in a matter of days. As I suspected from the moment I heard about this, it's not true.

Unlike most untrue warnings, this one wasn't harmful except that it clogged up people's in-boxes (and continues to do so because credulous people keep forwarding it).

I can't remember if I used to pass this kind of nonsense along to my email contacts, but after I had been online for several years I certainly used to evaluate this kind of message for relatives and friends. I like to think my diplomatically worded, if perhaps terse, replies to the senders eventually taught them to be less susceptible to hoaxes. All I know is that it had been a long time since I had been asked to cast an eyeball over one before this.

Fortunately, it no longer requires hard-won and sometimes embarrassing experience to distinguish fake from fact. snopes.com is my favorite verification site, though I admit that for the cell-phone email story I first performed a search to see what the Web as a whole had to say. (snopes.com was the second match in the list.)

Even more important to me is a guide to recognizing bogosity, since the best way to reduce the impact of hoaxes is to make people more likely to recognize them as bogus before they hit "Forward Mail." The Urban Legends pages at about.com have some good tips for spotting emailed hoaxes.