Monday, April 19, 2010

E-mails: To Forward or Not to Forward

While this blog doesn't have much to do with banking or offering finance tips, maybe this will curtail the amount of time (and thus money) wasted by people who forward hoax e-mails both at home and work.
Are you tired of all the forwarded e-mails you receive (often called urban legends or chain mail) that take up your in-box? Messages about free money, children in trouble, and other items designed to grab you and get you to forward the message to everyone you know? For some reason people feel the need to keep these going by forwarding to everyone in their address book.

If you receive an e-mail that you suspect may be a hoax, take the time to check it out on http://www.snopes.com/ . You can use the Snope Web site to research the information you receive to determine its accuracy. If the e-mail message is a hoax, you should delete it when you receive it instead of forwarding it. E-mail hoaxes are a problem because they invade our inboxes, waste our time reading and forwarding them, exploit our fears, and cause us to worry about things that aren't true. Worst of all, some recent hoax messages have been shown to contain computer viruses that will infect and destroy data on your computer and on the computers of everyone that you forward the message to.

So the next time you get ready to hit the "forward" icon on your in-box - take a moment to actually see if the information is accurate. More often then not - it won't be.

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