I’m not even talking about the ones from Jimmy, the armless, legless, eyeless boy who will get $.05 from Bill Gates every time you forward the email and say “I love Jesus.”
Those, I just delete.
But I got a particularly lame one today from some relatives (who I haven’t seen in years) about how Hillary “Rotten” Clinton hates the troops and rips off the Secret Service. I replied to all with a polite note explaining that the original is full of shit, with a link to the Snopes page so that they can find out exactly how full.
I didn’t really do it for any reason other than that I’m sitting around waiting for some test backups to run, and I don’t really have anything to do but listen to the tapes spin, but still - I’m wondering if I’m not the one who looks like an idiot here. Most of my relatives from that particular branch of the bush are older, retired, beer-swilling, deer-hunting, salt of the earth-types who usually frown on political discussions when the more interesting topics of hockey, beer-swilling, and deer-hunting are at hand.
They’re nice people, but some of them are a little dim.
Anyway, I kind of a feel like a jackass for being politics in to it, but then again, the original sender is the one who started it, by gracing my inbox with that bullshit. I’m willing to bet that they never, ever expected anybody to contradict them.
So - do any you still respond to the political glurge? Is it worth it? Got any good stories about giant family conflagrations that erupted because of it?
I’ve got a couple cow-workers that used to send me the glurge. I responded thoroughly pointed out the contradictions/problems/outright lies in them. A recent one was about a boycott against Citgo and the “dictator Chavez”. I went into detail about the Venezuelan elections, offered cites from CNN, FoxNews, and Snopes. I’ve got those people trained now that when they get glurge, they’ll ask me if it’s urban myth before forwarding it on.
I was going to say I never respond to such things, but I guess I can recall a couple of times that I did.
My usual intended approach is to simply delete such things unopened, but sometimes I am unable to tell from the caption what the contents will be.
I golf with a bunch of guys who are all quite a bit more politically and socially conservative than me. I’m a little surprised that some of them continue to send me political and/or social glurge even after I have clearly indicated that I pretty much disagree with them on all such issues. Sometimes when they have something that - for example - condemns muslim fanaticism and suggests restricting muslim religious practices, I’ll respond that I’m fine with such restrictions as long as they also apply to our homegrown christians. That kind of thing. But I no longer get into political or social arguments over such things.
Or I’ll simply refer them to Snopes.
At one point I realized that a good number of e-mails from a good friend I had golfed with for 15 years were somewhat evangelical. We had simply never discussed religion. I responded that he was free to send me whatever he wanted, but he might want to know that I did not believe in any god, and simply deleted any religious messages. He was a little surprised, and asked me a bit about my “beliefs,” and that was that. H had no idea of my beliefs, and instead, given our community and his lack of insight into the issue, simply assumed that everyone shared some version of his beliefs.
I wonder what exactly goes thru the mind of someone who sends such stuff. Do they realize that it will likely piss off the receiver who thinks otherwise, while having little chance of persuading them? I would never DREAM of sending a conservative/religious friend or family member propaganda supporting my views which I know differ from theirs.
Oooooh, I looooove glurge. It brings out the evil in me. I rewrite it, and then hit “reply all,” so the sender can be humiliated in front of his whole contacts list.
Depends on what it is and who sent it. I will usually write out a brief outline of the points that are either fabricated or distorted and then refer them to snopes for more detail.
I sadly am unable to rise to the level of glurge bashing that our lovely Eve is capable of. I will always live in awe of her talent.
I’ve never received glurge per se, but I have corrected people a couple of times using either Snopes (when the item in question was on it) or personal knowledge (when it wasn’t).
Everybody who has my email address has explicit instructions to never send me anything of the chain mail variety. No jokes, no glurge, no nothing unless it’s direct correspondence. You want to tell me a joke? Fine, cut n paste it to my email address ONLY and send it. Nobody I know would send me glurge, but sometimes in the past it’s been forwarded on in a chain.
Nip that shit in the bud, spammers love to latch onto a list with 500 active email addresses in it. A guy I work with gets these fear and gloom emails from someplace, the last one was some rat shit-born disease from the tops of soft drink cans. I took it upon myself to introduce him to Snopes on that one, just like the last 15 he came in here freaking out about.
And the easiest way to stop the glurge from people you don’t want to hurt their feelings: Just tell them you don’t want any of the forwarded crap so to avoid spammers. Most of them won’t take the time to send it just to you, it’s so much easier to “forward to all”. If they still send it, then just delete it.
I had a “friend” who was always sending me glurge. I finally got fed up, and sent him a *fuck off email *. Based on the responses in my thread on the subject, I was way out of line.
The guy in the thread was more of a friend-by-association. He was my friend’s brother’s best friend. :rolleyes: Anyways, I was always getting glurge from the lot of them - my friend, his brother, their mother, the brother’s friend, and so on. It had been going on for a while before I flamed the guy I mention in the thread. As a matter of fact, at one point I set up a filter to delete anything coming from [Friend’s Mom] containing the words [Jesus, Bill Gates, or Virus]. I haven’t seen any of them since last Fourth of July. Good riddence.
I’ve been known to temporarily block family members (it’s always family members that send them it seems) from sending me email altogether if they do not oblige my requests to be taken off their forwarding lists.
I’ll typically let a couple slide, and jokingly berate the sender if more arrive. But beyond that, I direct them, not always nicely, to Snopes.
The worst offender was my poor, misguided, gullible mother, but she finally learned that, blood relation or not, I’d get viscious if she kept sending them to me.
Be aware though of a new trend I’ve noticed recently: people prefacing these crappy emails with a disclaimer similar to, “Just so you know, I looked this up at Snopes.com, and it’s true!” replete with a link to a Snopes article that covers the forthcoming glurge but disproves or otherwise debunks the specific spin, which would be obvious to anyone who actually clicks the link and reads the text.
I usually look up the relevant entry on Snopes (there’s always a relevant entry on Snopes) and send the url to the person who committed the glurgification. If I’m feeling really ambitious I’ll go through the reasons it’s bullshit (it’s always bullshit).
If, after about the third time, they keep on sending me glurge, I just delete it unread. I don’t get that much mail that I feel I’ve gotta tell 'em to stop.
I asked my dear sister-in-law to look up scary e-mails on Snopes before passing them on, and she wrote back to me. “How do you know Snopes is telling the truth?” she asked. :dubious: :smack:
My sister in law is always sending me the “RE: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: VERY IMPORTANT! TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!” emails. The latest was the Ashley Flores email campaign whose purpose was to provide very vague details about the tragic disappearance of a 13-year-old girl. :rolleyes:
My SIL sends these forwards out en masse to everyone in her address book. The recipients apparently don’t look to see who besides themselves has received the same email, so I get about three more that originate from the first one I got from my SIL.
I read them, refer to Snopes (for my own edification), then delete the email messages. I’ve thought about sending my SIL a link to various Snopes articles from time to time, but when I stop to consider that she’s the type of person who likes to believe that she’s doing something good by warning people not to flash their headlights at gang members and notifying the nation about a missing girl who probably doesn’t exist, I shrug my shoulders and decide to fight ignorance the old-fashioned way…starting at home, with my kids.
I got one from a couple people at my church a couple years ago & I fired back at this one-
the “CBS cancelled Touched By An Angel because it kept mentioning God & Dr. James Dobson called for everyone to write CBS in defense of TBAA” one…
wrong on both counts… and sometimes for extra doofus points, a version
popped up adding the infamous “Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s FCC petition to stop
relgious broadcasting” story.
Both the people I responded to did thank me for the clarification.
I got one today that combined the true-but-outdated Osama’s been captured virus alert and the hoax Invitation virus alert. I sent a short note and snopes link to my friend and the other addressees. It won’t do any good but at least I tried.
I’m not far away from using Eve’s “reply to all” technique…
My mom gets a lot of health warning glurge – “coffee has MSG,” “your colon contains 10 pounds of decaying fecal matter,” etc. She gets me to write the responses (in addition to Snopes, I’ll cite any appropriate textbooks or magazines), which I really enjoy. My last message actually convinced one of the worst offenders, a close family member, to be more skeptical about such health claims.
I used to have to. I’ve got most of my family and friends trained by now. I never had to go to the extent of a “Reply to All” bomb though.
One aunt in particular would send me tons of these things. Little-known “facts,” anything religious, spooky stuff, she loved it all. Before I found Snopes, I used to debunk it myself. I don’t think she ever got the hint, but she might have gotten tired of getting multiple page emails back in response. It was worth it. I used to get something like one or two crap emails a week from her, now I only get emails she, herself, writes. No matter how syrupy the tone and no matter how many God blesses she writes, at least I’m getting it from her and not some anonymous idiot.
I also had to tell people not to sign me up for e-cards or anything. That one required a mass-mailing, but that way I only had to explain once how and why you get spam from providing online information. It still took a while, and at least one correspondence slap, before some of them stopped doing that.
At least two of my relatives had to be cautioned not to give out certain information in an email. They were answering questionnaires that asked things like, “What was your mother’s maiden name?” and, “How old are you?” along with other, less critical stuff like, “What kind of salad dressing do you like?” They hadn’t realized that even though the person who actually sent them the email might be trustworthy, someone else that person forwards email to might not be. The analogies I gave them were, if you’re not comfortable giving that information to a total stranger over the phone, or if you don’t mind shouting it out in the middle of a crowded restaurant, you probably shouldn’t provide that information online either. I’m glad I did that since it probably saved them from getting phished at some point.
After I had been married for fifteen years, I finally met my husband’s first cousin. She was a lovely person and the evening was enjoyable.
I was disappointed to find glurge email from her that had to do with banning same sex marriages and keeping marriage sacred in America.
I wrote a short response indicating as politely as I could that I didn’t agree with this particular political/social/religious point of view. I heard nothing in response.
In another month or two another glurge on the same topic arrived from her. This time I wrote a longer and much more pointed and adamant response about tolerance and love and non-judgment. I was on my soapbox.
She wrote back apologizing for her mistake in sending me the material. She hadn’t even read it herself.
A couple of months after that, she ended her thirty year marriage.
