If you have an email address, it is very likely that you've received a hoax message via email. Promises of free Outback Steakhouse coupons, the assurance of $1,000 in prize money from Microsoft's Bill Gates, instructions for killing mosquitoes using Proctor and Gamble's Lemon Fresh Joy, warnings of an immediate and severe toilet paper shortage due to the destruction of a large toilet paper manufacturing plant located in California during last summer's forest and brush fires, ... and the list goes on. Many of the same email hoaxes have been circulating around the Internet for years.

Some "creators" of email hoax messages start these "eRumors" to harass people or companies. Others are written by spammers who gather the carbon copied email addresses from forwarded emails they come across to then send new spam to or sell to fellow spammers. Most writers of email hoaxes, however, do so simply to watch how quickly their "creations" spread. Sometimes hoaxes can spread across the globe literally overnight. It's easy to see how. If one email hoax is forwarded to just ten friends and those friends forward the message to ten of their friends and so on, after only six forwarded messages in this fashion, the result is one million email hoax recipients.

Not only can email hoaxes be a nuisance to the recipients, the cumulative effect is a general slowing down of email servers around the world. If specific companies are targeted, hoaxes can be public relations nightmares for those entities. Email hoaxes not only waste people's time, but they can scare recipients into taking incorrect or even harmful actions.

So what to do? According to Sierra Tel Internet and Cornerstone Publishing, one of the best methods of finding out whether or not an email message is a hoax (when the message refers to a product or company) is to first go to the website of the company or institution mentioned within the message. For example, when an email began circulating in August of 2003 espousing the benefits of the new "Mayo Clinic Grapefruit Diet," Rochester, Minnesota's Mayo Clinic immediately posted a link on its website telling people that the information was false. (See http://www.mayoclinic.com/invoke.cfm?objectid=8E199485-EB00-418B-B6BF8BED83C675E7.) The same is true regarding the "Four Free Cases of Coke" email hoax that has made its rounds throughout the World Wide Web more than once. The Coca-Cola Company immediately posted information on its site (http://www2.coca-cola.com/contactus/faq/promotions.html) about the hoax and asked people to disregard the hoax. If you are unsure of the company's website, type the name of the company into most any search engine, e.g. Google, and the company's site will no doubt be listed. In fact, the first website on the resulting search list will most likely be the company's "official" website. You can be assured that if you have received an email hoax that hundreds, if not thousands, of others have also received the same hoax message and the matter will be addressed somewhere on the targeted company's website.

There are also some websites that are dedicated to alerting Internet users of hoaxes circulating around the Web. These sites include search tools to research archived hoaxes by name or subject. Hoax information sites to bookmark in the Favorites list of your browser include:

http://www.truthorfiction.com/
http://www.vmyths.com/

In short, the next time you receive an email message that you believe to be a hoax, do some quick research before forwarding the message on to family and friends. If you receive an email message that was forwarded to you from a friend and you've confirmed the message to be a hoax, let your friend down gently when telling him/her not to be expecting $1,000 from Bill Gates anytime soon.

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