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Bill Gates will send you a nickel for every person you forward this to! Captain Kangaroo was one of the great unsung heroes of Iwo Jima! Target stores hate Christmas and will club you over the head if you dress like Santa Claus!

Fortunately a lot of people have caught on to the utter nonsense of email chain letters and hoaxes. Of course, that doesn't stop a certain family member of mine from sending them on to me, and I'm sure many of you out there know a person like that too. Sure, you can completely debunk pretty much any of these silly stories with, say, a whopping thirty seconds of Googling, but unfortunately some people out there will automatically believe everything they see, especially when it's hysterically alarmist and condescending (insert joke about Bill O'Reilly fans here)

There are some emails that are just random bizarre stories about celebrities, such as the aforementioned one on Captain Kangaroo having been a hero on Iwo Jima (never mind that he didn't enlist until months after the fighting at Iwo Jima). There are strange money scams, where a Nigerian prince has made you his heir, or Bill Gates is testing email forwarding software, and either way, you'll totally cash in (never mind that both scenarios are completely nonsensical). Usually these are just harmless jokes perpetrated by bored people who want to see how much of a fuss they can drum up, or possibly to get people to boycott a product/store/whatever by sending out random false stories ("lies and propaganda!").

Then there are some types of chain letters that can actually have harmful consequences. Take, for example, the story of a girl who told an internet friend too much information, and he tracked her down and... turned out to be a police officer! Yes, apparently the best way to teach kids about the dangerous of information sharing is to feed them a completely nonsensical story about teen-stalking cops. Why is this dangerous? Well, ever heard of The Boy who Cried Wolf? People are more likely to ignore a genuine danger after a few nonsense stories. Worst of all are the phishing emails, where people try to get you to click their links to enter your username and password information for such sites as PayPal, eBay, or online banking sites.

There's a simple way to deal with most of these letters. Most email programs have filters that can be set to block out emails that meet certain criteria - for instance, you can block out any email with "FWD:" in the subject line, while making exceptions for people who actually forward useful information. Trust me, that will save you a lot of headaches. Or, you can direct your forward-happy friend to a site like snopes.com, where people research these strange email stories and determine the validity, and where they do this REALLY crazy thing called 'citing sources'. Wow! Imagine that.

Now as for the worst, the phishing emails, they work by putting clickable links in the email that takes you to their page, which has been made up to look like PayPal (or whatever), where you type in your information and unknowingly send it right to the phishers. So the best way to deal with those emails is to always, ALWAYS type the web address directly into the browser, and NEVER click a link in a message, no matter how professional the email looks.

Learn more about this author, JohnJaySmith.
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