If they’re anything like my mom, they just learned not to send YOU anything. My mom sends me and about 20 other people urban legend crap all the time. I, as a dutiful son, reply to all with a link to snopes letting them know it’s a fake. Makes mom mad. It’s tough love, but the number of Mom Spams have diminished.
I do this too and it’s totally stopped my friends from forwarding any crap. It’s weird tho’, they actually don’t want to know whether some random email they get is true or not. They’re happier just mindlessly forwarding it along…
Any email which claims that anything out of the ordinary will happen if you forward it to someone else is lying, plain and simple.
If the email says that some sick child will receive money for a transplant if you forward the email, it is lying.
If the email says that you will receive money if you forward the email, it is lying.
If the email says that a funny video will pop up on your screen if you forward the email, it is lying.
Basically, if the email says that anything other than annoying the people you’re forwarding the email to will happen, it is lying.
I can assure you that this spam’s been going around since at LEAST 1996 (when I was first on the Net) and I haven’t gotten a THING.
I got that e-mail a while ago too. I sent it the trash where it belongs.
It’s not always a lost cause. My mom used to send me anything and everything when she first got email, from the sick greeting-card collectors to the warnings about some innocuous file actually being the worst virus EVER! so delete it immediately! or you’ll get cancer of the duodenum! :rolleyes:
A few Snopes links later, she learned how to do her own research, and now she’s eminently skeptical about the stuff that arrives in her in-box. I don’t know if she’s a rare exception for being so willingly trainable, though. Based on other stories I’ve heard, she might be.
So maybe it’ll be a waste of time, but you never know, so I figure it’s always worth it, just in case…
As someone said I did stop E’s from a lot of people after
I started raising Hell about FWDs. 
I now get people sending me a recent FWD they’ve gotten and wanting to know if it’s true or not. I really want to tell them to check it out on Snopes themselves but I imagine if they have that much trust in me the least I can do is scope it out for them.
I forgot to mention in my last reply. These FWDs got so bad I made up the greatest certificate using a paint program. I called it the “Phineas T. Barnum Award”. It was a real piece of work! Had PTB’s picture on it and the awardees name. It went on about how
most FWDs do nothing but clog up the net and scare people and other things. I sent it to a friends mother but never did get a response. I’d make up another one but I hardly ever get any more FWDs. It’s on another computer that I fried so I don’t have access to it. Maybe something similar could be made up and sent out as needed. Might help?
I still feel if everyone, meaning us smart SDers, would simply send an E back to as many originators as they can find on a FWD explaining the problems they cause it just might stop some from sending them. Then again…
A number of my contacts occasionally send me religious glurge or petition requests; I’m gonna start responding with “Hey, you do know these messages are started by Satanists, so they can gather your contact details, right?”