Email Rumors and Urban Legends

Find Out What's True and What's Not

Email Rumors

Don’t you love the email chains or forwards you get on a daily basis?



I’m not talking about chain letters , but those messages your friends send that have like 200 email addresses in them and were forwarded to dozens of other people before they made their way to you.

You know, the cute little poems or the hysterical jokes about how little men know about women?

We all get them.

90% of the time they are annoying, 5% of the time they are appreciated, and the other 5% , the email rumors, can be startling.

Those last 5%, the startling ones, are the email chains I want to talk about.

We’ve all seen urban legends about the danger our pets face because of air fresheners .

Or how about the one where the criminals are cutting the ankles of women as they get into their vehicle?

Some email chains are pretty off-the-wall, but, they are apparently believable, as someone sent them to you!

Sometimes it’s easy to believe the urban legends ourselves and pass them onto others.

But we need to take an extra step first.

Before you forward any exposé, urban legend, or warning-type email, check with Snopes first to see if it is real.

Snopes is a site determined to get to the bottom of fake emails. They research the origin of the messages, and chances are, if you have it in your inbox, Snopes has already seen and investigated it.

Most of the time, the email is false.

When this happens, I like to reply to the person who forwarded it to me with the link to the page on Snopes that uncovered the misinformation.

When the email is true, and not an urban legend, I will still include the Snopes link, so that other doubting email readers like myself can easily see that it is not false.

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