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Home > Resources > Technology Articles > Hoax Email

Don't Forward that Hoax!

It's the latest form of miscommunication and trickery and it's rampant in e-mail circles - hoaxes. Hoaxes are messages that claim false information and can be as destructive and disruptive as viruses. Unlike viruses, Leapfrog can't thwart these threats due to the benign nature of their delivery. Most of us know by now that Bill Gates is not going to give away $1000 or trips to Disney World to people who forward e-mail. But there are thousands of hoaxes circulating through e-mail, and many of them are so subtle and so believable that it's easy to fall victim. How often do you get an e-mail warning of crime at the mall, detailing steps of removing a new virus, or exposing government corruption? How do you know if it's real or a hoax? How often do you forward them? Is it really hurting anybody?

The hidden cost of Hoax E-Mails

There is a real, tangible cost to these hoaxes-even if the recipient only deletes the message. Hoax e-mail messages overload people with unnecessary messages, waste time, upset people, clog servers and may even trick people into damaging their system. According to the Department of Energy, if everyone on the Internet spent one minute reading and discarding a single hoax e-mail message, the cost would be over $41,000,000.00. (This cost is based on wasted user time at an average cost of $50 per hour.) Another cost is for the mail server capacity to handle these messages. If a recipient of a hoax e-mail message forwards it to 10 people, and each of those recipients forwards it to 10 people, by the 6th generation there are 1,000,000 copies of the message being handled by mail servers. Storage capacities and speed are affected, and the increasing capacity and speed to handle the overload, costs companies millions of dollars every year.

Some messages are more obviously hoaxes than other. A big clue that a message is a hoax is the phrase: "forward this to everyone you know." Another tip off is bad spelling, punctuation, and lots of capital letters. However, the Internet also makes it easy to check out e-mail messages to see if they are a hoax.

The next time you receive a forward from someone, take a few minutes to check it out before you forward it to everyone you know. You could even forward a link to information about that hoax back to the sender. Then maybe next time they'll think twice before forwarding.

More Information on Computer Hoaxes:

Here are several web sites that offer lists of viruses, hoaxes, and urban legends with comments as to their authenticity.

This article originally appeared in the August, 2002 issue of FrogTalk.