Email hoax spotting 101

Every now and then some caring person in my email network, trying only to save her friends from certain doom, spreads around an email hoax.

A hoax is anything designed to trick someone into believing or accepting as genuine something false.

A lot of these are rather clever, but I like to think I have a pretty good success rate at sniffing them out, so I thought I would share my tips and tricks at hoax spotting:

1. Does the email overly excite or threaten you in some way?
After reading the email do you get a little tingling feeling in the pit of your stomach, or feel the hairs rise on your arms or the back of your neck? These are primal responses to fear. Even in the age of Internet, they serve you well.

The email could be threatening you with annoying calls from telemarketers on your beloved cell phone (with the additional threat that you may have to pay for these unwanted calls) or with the loss of value of your cash cards for store merchandise at the Christmas season, but these threats are just that: promises of potential harm to you or things you value. Hoaxers and spammers have also gotten smart, using devices such as politics and primal urges to get you to click on their unexpected emails.

2. Does the email prompt you to immediate action?
Are there clear consequences for your failure to act at once? Is there a deadline? Is there a clearly defined path of easy action for you to take in your fearful or excited mood?

3. Does it seem in any way incredulous?
Do you read the email and think to yourself, Why haven't I heard of this before? How could this have been a big secret? How could this have happened? This isn't fair!

4. Are you wondering how did I get this email?
Most email has an easily defined purpose:
Friends or co-workers communicating directly with you.
Jokes and inspirational notes from friends to make you smile, laugh or ponder.
Information or offers from businesses you know for services you signed up for.
Spam -- email you did not ask for about services you did not ask for from people you don't know

Hoaxes blur the borders between these classes. They are usually email you did not ask for about services you did not ask for from people you know.

If your email meets any of those criteria, it should be enough to send you to the Internet to search.

Usually just doing a random search for the subject of your email (google or your favorite search engine) will get you a recent post or two on the subject. The Internet is pretty small these days. If you've heard about your email, chances are pretty good someone else has too.

If that hasn't given you enough information to decide, you can always try the Urban Legends Reference Pages at snopes.com. The folks there have been testing and debunking Internet myths since 1995, so they have a lot of records to compare to. It's amazing how often the same hoaxes come around dressed in different clothes.

Sometimes the email is not a hoax at all, but has been sent to you so you will open it, read something, and click on a link (or download a video player) to see more, allowing the hidden programs at the other end of the link to infect your computer.

Sometimes the email is not even a hoax. There was one last summer about a ship being launched made of scrap steel from the World Trade Center. It met the first of the criteria, overly exciting, and the third, why didn't I hear about this before? but not the other two. Enough to prompt a dive for snopes, and to a page which said, "Rumor... True."

So not all news is bad news, but it never hurts to be critical, or optimistically skeptical, as I call it.