Before you hit the “forward” button
I’ve referred to this site before, but it bears repeating. When you receive an email with some heart-warming story, or amazing photograph, or outrageous story of corporate/government/celebrity behavior, don’t hit that forward button. Take a minute and surf on over to www.snopes.com and see if your recently received email is in their vast databases of Internet urban legends.
The Snopes site is an effort to catalog and verify thousands of various tales of the Internet. The folks that run the site do an amazing job of tracking down the details behind these emails, and can usually document whether they are true, false, or somewhere inbetween. Even if you don’t have a specific story to check out, it’s incredibly interesting just to cruise through and see what kinds of rumors, stretched truths, and outright fairy tales are circulating out there.
And consider it part of your email civic duty to not pass on emails that are fraudulent, especially when it’s so easy to take a minute and check them out!