I just checked my email, and yes, another forward from my mother, who had it forwarded from a friend, regarding a virus warning. My mother forwarded it to me with the attached Snopes article verifying the warning as a hoax.
But…why did she send it on to me at all???
I love my mom, but sometimes she really makes me go “Hmmmmmmmmm…?”
Maybe she sent it to you so she could show you that she’s learning? She now responds to these things by linking people to Snopes?
Of course that’s assuming you were one of many recipients. If she sent it just to you, well, I’ve got no clue.
Ah, if it were only that simple!
One of my mom’s friends received the hoax, who then forwarded it to a list of people, including my mother. Then one of the recipients looked up and sent out the snopes information to my mom’s friend, who then sent to mom and the rest of the list. Then my mother, bless her pea pickin’ heart, sent the entire episode on to me. Okay, me, and four other family/friends who had not received the original hoax message!
She’s a funny ol’gal, and I love her dearly, but this computer stuff is a puzzlement to her!
Then there is my dad, who simply cannot let go of my original email address, even though I have asked again and again that he use my gmail address. So everything he sends to my old address I must forward to myself at gmail, because don’t you know that his forwards always contain attachments, which even if I could open in my old address, I wouldn’t.
This all correlates with my extreme aversion to cell phones, which my kids have and love, but when they hand them to me to use, (to quote Lewis Black) “I am confused”!!! (Oh, and she also sent me a warning about cell phones, which I deleted, as I do not do cell phones!)
I used to get those hoax things all the time. I would always send them a link to snopes but these people are stubborn about entering the rational world of reality for some reason. After a few years and several email address changes, I finally had an address book free of paranoid (yet well meaning) hoax sending people.
Then a couple of months ago at work, I ran into an old friend from childhood. We exchanged email address’s. Oh will I never learn? :smack:
She doesn’t email me often, but everytime she does it is snopes-worthy. The last one was one of these:
“A friend of a friend had a cousin who’s mothers sister-in-law’s half brother knew a guy who’s grandfathers uncle had a house that mysteriously burnt down. The fire inspector traced it to an outlet in which was a…GLADE PLUG-IN!!. Please if you love your family and friends urge them all to NOT use GLADE PLUG-INS!!”
I gotta hand it to her, I have been free of this crap for so long that this was a new one to me.
That bitch is going on my blocked senders list.
I got the Glade one from my step-daughter last week, wherein she say “Snopes says it’s true!” I emailed her back and told her that if she’s going to bother to go to Snopes, she had better read the whole article :rolleyes: .
You have to be cruel to be kind to the hoax forwarders.
First you hunt down one or more references as to the fact that it’s a hoax. Preferably one that estimates just how long this particular dollop of crap has been floating around.
Then you compose an e-mail with a link to your source(s), explaining once again how most alarming e-mails are hoaxes, and how millions of people forwarding them around is just making the internet slower and more expensive. It’s tricky, but you have to get the tone just right. You want to come across as basically polite, but as though you are being polite to a former mental patient.
Then you send it, not just to the person. Yes, friends, I’m talking about the normally verboten “Reply to All” button. Send it to everyone they sent it to. It’s part of your civic duty to fight ignorance.
Npw, discouraging hoax-forwarders is very much like washing the smell of cat piss out of fabric: It almost always takes three or four tries, but eventually it works.
I didn’t even bother going to snopes to fact check it. The way I see it, it’s inside the realm of possibility that something like that could somehow cause a fire. So, in that respect it could be true. BUT, my house could also burn down from a faulty furnace, or that damn lamp with a hinky switch that I keep threatening to replace.
The point is, alot of what you see in those forwards are things that could possibly happen, but it’s just life. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, but I don’t have a phobia of leaving the house because of the off chance that it could happen.
I just don’t have much tolerance for paranoia.
I have an old joke email somewhere that mocks these hoax’s in a “it’s so funny you piss your pants” fashion. If it wasn’t so horrendously long I’d post it here.