Email Rumors

Who gets email rumors? Everybody

Who creates them? A few souls

Who spreads them? Everybody

Most of us get chain letters from friends, sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are interesting and sometimes they are annoying.

Some of they come as very elaborate PowerPoint presentations with sound effects. Some of them come as pictures and some of them as just plain text.

Every now and then we get an email rumor that makes us stop and think. Take for example, an email I recently got about how Obama’s was going to ban black cars because of energy consumption concerns. I went to www.snopes.com a site that keeps track of virtually every rumor, and checked it. False. Not that I was going to be affected. I don’t have a black car, but I feel for the owners of black cars.

Later, I got an email about a man who had been sleeping in a dumpster, and got picked up by a garbage truck along with the trash. It bothered me enough to check snopes.com. True. The man did get picked up and survived the ordeal, he could have been killed. I didn't know what to make of all that.

Why do I – together with thousands of people - get emails about these things? Why would people bother sending those messages around? The reason is simple: It's because we can. If we get something in the mail we like or find interesting, all we have to do is forward it so others can enjoy it too.

Before email, the burden of deciding what was worth reading fell on the shoulders of the sender. You had to decide if the piece of paper was good enough for you to spend a stamp (or many stamps) on it, to send it to all your contacts.

Now you don’t have to spend a dime to send everything you get to everyone you know. The burden of sifting good material from junk has shifted from sender to receiver. Not a big deal, we are the same players, we all send and we all receive. It’s just a matter of being aware of the shift, that’s all.

Before you forward an email, do a quick check to see if it's an email hoax. If you find out that the email you got is false, then let the sender know, so they don't keep passing it on, or if they already sent it out, at least they can send a correction.

Email Rumors in Other Languages

I get a lot of email rumors in Spanish. I haven’t figured out a good way to check them all out. Some of them are plain translations of an English message, so I try the English version and voilà, www.snopes.com knows about it. However, there are some emails that look quite suspect and but I have no way to check if they are true. If you have found a way to check hoaxes in other languages, please drop me a note, I'll include your contribution here and give you due credit for helping everyone out.