Hoax Spam

I got another one of those horrible bulk emails that zillions of
people have forwarded to everyone they know, warning you of some
bizarre danger that can strike unsuspecintg citizens at any time,
allowing it to grown longer and more unreadable as all the cc's past
and present are allowed to accumulate in the body of the message.

I used to just hit the delete key.

But nowadays I have a special reply I send to these messages. I make
sure I "reply to all", and often I take the time to extract all the
buried email addresses from the body of the message and send my reply
to them as well.

Many people have thanked me for this message. My hope is that it will
educate at least a few people, and in some small way help to reduce
this problem. At the very least, it has gotten me off many of these
mailing lists. Feel free to use it yourself.

Here it is:

This is a hoax. It is one of the best-known hoaxes on the Internet.
Please stop forwarding it to people.

Read about this and other hoaxes at the Urban Legends website:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/

Any time you get a message like this that asks you to forward to
everyone you know, there is a 99.999999% chance it is a hoax or
practical joke. Always assume that sad or scary stories that have been
forward zillions of times are hoaxes. Any story that claims sending
emails can generate money is a hoax. The person who sent it to you
might have good intentions, but they have been fooled, just like the
person who forwarded it to them, and the person who forwarded it to
them, etc., etc., etc. They have been tricked into becoming spammers.

Don't fall for it.

There are several things you can do to stop - or at least slow down -
this kind of foolish, annoying, time-wasting spam.

When someone sends you one of these messages, DO NOT FORWARD IT!

Reply to the sender (and everyone on their cc list) with a list of
these hoax-busting websites.

Urban Legends: http://urbanlegends.about.com/
Urban Legends Reference Pages: http://snopes.com/
Hoaxbusters: http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
Computer Virus Myths: http://www.vmyths.com/

You can use these websites yourself to learn more about the problem of
hoax spam and look up specific hoaxes.