Send your friend the following reply:
“Did you know that the word “gullible” does NOT appear in the dictionary? It’s true!”
Nice Wildest Billism. Did you do that on purpose? 
[QUOTE=whiterabbit]
“But I meant well. And it could have happened!” or similar.
<snip>
I’ve been guilty of that a few times myself. (Hanging head in shame. :smack: ) But, my response has generally been “I meant well. Ooops! Sorry! Where do I look again?” or “How did you find that? I must have used the wrong keyword.”
I am usually well intentioned, and even sometimes accurate, but mostly willing to accept correction. Especially about an urban legend. And have had a few that I was suspicious about, but couldn’t find. So, I didn’t correct my mother. I also didn’t pass it along - so there’s hope for me yet.
Earlier this summer, my mom sent me the Mars email. In fact, she sent me a particularly silly variant where it was claimed that Mars would appear as large as the moon in the night sky. With the naked eye, you could examine the Martian canals as easily as spotting the Tycho crater.
This is worse than a normal spam email forwarding for the following reasons:
- My mother is extroadinarily intelligent. In the 60’s, she got several unsolicited invitations to join Mensa.
- My mother has been educated numerous times by all her children, stepchildren and grandchildren to check Snopes before forwarding anything.
- Finally, and this one is really the kicker, my stepfather is an astrophysicist. He was sitting at his desk in the next room, computing the orbits of binary stars, when she recieved this mail and eagerly forwarded it to everyone she knows.
This is one of the kinds of things that makes me look in the mirror and say “Yes, this really is your life. No, you aren’t having a prank played on you. Accept and move forward.”
Sitting in a lecture theatre with about 150 other students, lecturer puts up an (obviously photoshopped) phot of an iceberg
Me: “Yeh that’s a fake”
PL: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Yup.”
PL: “I’m pretty sure it’s real, a very trusted friend sent this to me. It was taken somewhere off Newfoundland.”
Me: “Yeh, it’s fake”
PL: “You meet with me after class and we will discuss this”
Suffice to say that after I emailed him the snopes link that night, he emailed me back saying “It just goes to show, you can’t trust anything you see on the internet”.
Wait a second… Snopes is on the internet! I’m not sure if it was meant to be an insult or not. The class got an apology the next day.
I emailed one fucker who sent me the “horse sedatives that make you sterile being used as a date rape drug” story :rolleyes: back the snope link*. And he still sends me shit!
*Even with a “anyone who had the tiniest knowledge of biology would see this was fake.”
If you’re willing to say, “Oops. I was wrong,” then you’re not at all the sort of person I was talking about. I once got flamed by a bunch of people on an email list after seeing a piece of crap somebody had sent to said list and after watching people left and right falling for it, I posted something like, “When you see emails like this, you probably want to check out Snopes. Here’s a link about this one.” You see, whoever sent it had meant well. So I was the horrible person, no matter that I was as nice as I could be when I really wanted to say, “Don’t post this bullshit! It’s crap! Why are you wasting our time with this shit?”
I try not to mass reply, because I don’t want to embarrass the original sender, unless they are a frequent offender. I will send the link only to the sender, and sometimes, there’s a follow up e-mail, “I’ve just learned this is incorrect. Disregard.” They get to look smart, hopefully they’ve learned to check things before sending them out, and I get the knowledge that I have struck a blow against ignorance in my own tiny way.
The version I got had a paragraph tacked on the end about Billy wishing he could have a kitty that wouldn’t try to bury its turds in his leaves.
My sister in law is the Snopes queen, and turned me on to the site - for which I was very grateful. Imagine my delight when she sent me something I was able to “Snopes” her on! She sent a follow-up to everyone she had sent the false e-mail to, apologizing and admitting she’d been caught out! (She’s extremely intelligent and usually right, so a chance to catch her out on something is cause for celebration.)
Same here, but in this case, everybody else but me was falling for it. And I was pissed off. I still tried to be nice about it, though.
Honestly, I’ve had email in one form or another since I was 13. And I have never gotten one of these “forward this” things that was supposed to be true that was. Never.
:rolleyes:
I did that on an email yahoo list i had been on - remember the one about some sort of virus/trojan thingy from about 7 or 8 years ago - tried snopesing it, but I cant remember exactly which one. It was supposed to be the most infectious dangerous evil virus that JUST was discovered today … per MS and Siemantek as reported by CNN. So I went to snopes, and MS, , CNN and Siemantek, and a few other different virus protection webpages. I pointed out that this incredible bit of news was on NO site whatsoever, including CNN, where the news was purportedly to have broken. I do remember that Snopes had said that specific email had been first seen about 5 years previous. Added lots of useful links, and pointed out that it was an old hoax.
I got flamed like you would not believe, and decided after that that no matter how much of a fan I was of this particular actor, there was no way I was ever going to bother being part of this group.
Eh, maybe she didn’t read it very carefully. The e-mail from the Snopes link would have fully convinced me.
The same thing happened to me. I finally bailed out of the group in disgust at the nonstop glurge, the willful refusal to entertain so much as a shred of skepticism, the huffy outrage at being shown the truth.
But you WILL see a Popup window if you visit Snopes- and sometimes quite a dangerous one. :mad: I don’t like the fact that Snopes whores out their site with no concern for their visitors.
I’m also quite disappointed with Snopes that they have popups, and ones that sneak past Firefox’s defenses, too. What’s the dangerous one, though?
RevTim
It permanently puts your E-Mail address on the ‘planet Mars’ E-Mailing list.
Actually the first time I saw that typed it was Diane that did it. I always say OMG GOD, even IRL now.
I got a “missing child” e-mail from my grandfather a little while ago. Bah. Why do I even check what he sends me?
One tried to load a Trogan onto my computer (quite some time ago) and at least one other led to a bogus anti-spyware site.
Last week at work our security administrator sent out an email to warn everyone about the “Life is Beautiful” virus. It took me less than a minute to provide him with a link telling him that it was an old hoax virus. He never did send an email telling everyone not to worry. But that may be a good thing.