Today, I received a forwarded email. After scrolling down quite a ways, passing all the forwards in the header, I was able to read the original email. It was about a missing child in Kansas. His mother was pleading for help. This email had been forwarded countless times before being forwarded to me. In the top of the email was hundreds of people’s names and emails from the forward headers, potentially exposing these people to spam.

Should I forward this email? That’s a question you may ask yourself when you get an email like this that gets at your emotions. Before you go forwarding ANY email, you need to do your home work.

The first thing I did when I received this email was copy the child’s name and did a search on bing.com. Google works too, or even Yahoo. When you get an email like this, one of the best ways to see if it is real, is to do a search. If it is, you will find creditable sources. For example, if this email would have been real, I would have found news stories on creditable news sites (cnn, fox, msnbc, etc).

In this case, one of the first results was a link to snopes.com. Snopes.com is a very creditable source to finding out whether or not a story is true or false.

I followed the link and read the article. It was marked as false – the email was a fake. I replied to the person who had sent it to me and let them know (nicely) that it was a hoax and to be careful. I then explained to them how to check to see if it was true or false

Now, if the email turned out to be real, and I still wanted to forward it, the first thing I would do would be to remove all the forwarding messages from the top of the email. It’s the polite thing to do, not only for the people listed, but for your next reader who will not have to scroll endlessly to read the email.

Another email I received (a number of times) was saying that Starbucks made a statement saying they do not support our troops and that they would never send them coffee. Checking this out, it turns out that this was also in fact FALSE. The truth – Starbucks gives coffee to their employees which they are allowed to give to causes and are encouraged to send it to soldiers.

Don’t be embarrassed, check things out before you email. Great damage has been done because of witless forwarding.