The following is a canned response to anyone that sends me a hoax or blatantly false information. Please don't think I'm on the muscle or anything, I am just trying to convey the affects of hoax messages and hopefully educate people along the way.

Nothing against you or your well intentioned message. It is hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people are so willing to set aside that intelligence to believe the blatant garbage spewed in hoaxes or on questionable sites.  Just because something is in an e-mail or on a web site does not make it fact.  Without knowing the political motives, financial backings, or even the mental state of the authors of these hoaxes or scrupulous web sites one runs the risk of losing the respect of someone on the receiving end when you click "Forward".

Before looking like a fool, at least search a few sites to authenticate the information.  A few good links about hoaxes, urban legends, and viruses are:

http://www.snopes.com

http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org

http://www.truthorfiction.com

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html

http://www.hoaxkill.com

http://www.schmahl.net/virusinfo.htm

http://www.ultratech-llc.com/KB/?File=AntiVirus.TXT

http://www.vmyths.com

http://www.scambusters.org

Feel free to cut and paste or forward this to your friends.

DON'T SEND CHAIN LETTERS THROUGH THE INTERNET. I have to disagree with you about the e-mail snowball:

 >Send this message to as many people as possible< 

What you are doing is generating a chain letter. There are several problems with chain letters:

(1) Once launched, your message can circulate for years, causing millions of useless messages on the Internet, wasting people's time and Internet bandwidth (capacity). For a look at what this kind of unlimited message can cause, see the notorious Craig Shergold spam, which has been absolutely impossible to stop. I quote from "The Year in Review in InfoSec -- 1996" published in the January issue of the ICSA NEWS: "In a graphic demonstration of the harm that undated, unauthorized, immortal and unauthenticated messages circulating on the Internet can have, the Make-a-Wish Foundation set up an 800 hot line and a Web page begging for the end of one of the many variations of the Craig Shergold urban myth. Craig Shergold is a kid who had a brain tumor but it was removed and he's now fine. Unfortunately, several thousand messages a day continue to circulate among well-meaning but naive people who think that the poor chap wants their post cards and business cards. He doesn't, and neither does the postal service where he lives. Make-a-Wish have been tarred with this bizarre brush because some nitwit embroidered the story to implicate them in the scheme and now they receive thousands of pieces of unwanted mail for someone they have never been involved with. Lesson: do NOT forward chain letters without verifying their accuracy.  See http://www.wish.org/home/frame_chainletters.htm or call 800-215-1333, x. 184 for information about the Craig Sergold chain letters.

(2) There is no way for you or anyone else to stop the chain letter once it gets started. 

(3) Chain letters are a violation of Netiquette (proper behavior on the Internet).

(4) If you used your corporate account, you are making your own employer liable for serious trouble if people become annoyed by the useless traffic that includes your address. Possible damages: mail-bombing (large volumes of unwanted mail) to your account or to your postmaster's account at your company; publication of your company's toll-free number in various unsavory regions of the Net, resulting in avalanches of unwanted (and expensive) calls the company will pay for. You yourself could be in major trouble for initiating such a sequence of events. If your corporate appropriate use guidelines do not forbid this sort of wasted effort, they ought to. If they do include prohibitions on frivolous use of computer resources, you may face disciplinary action.

(5)There is no way to be sure that the people on person A's list will not send the message to people who include A on their lists. There is a real possibility of extended batches of useless mail circulating from one person to another and back; this phenomenon is known as a mail-storm and is a real problem on the Net. I am really sorry to rain on your day (especially if you thought you were doing something good), but this is a really bad mistake. I am sending this message to everyone on your list in the hope of stopping a minor disaster. DON'T SEND CHAIN LETTERS THROUGH THE INTERNET.

Click HERE to mail a link for this document to someone.