02/03/99

Email Hoaxes

The Significant Other lives for email.

I first came to her attention, in fact, back in 1993, pre-Internet, on a Computer Bulletin Board (BBS.) We struck up an electronic conversation. I flirted a little, which was rare back then. She flirted a little, and was good at it. We would not have met otherwise. I worked nights, at a newspaper. She worked days, selling computer hardware.

Flash forward six years, and the computers are side by side in the spare bedroom. The Significant Other lives for email. She doesn't flirt as much as she used to.

But she still has the same pet peeve -- email hoaxes. She got one the other day, the one about Bill Gates and Disney teaming up to offer free vacations. ("This one is REAL, I saw it on the Disney Channel myself, PASS IT ON." Yadda yadda.) We had both gotten the same email from well-meaning "friends" six months previously. We have been getting messages with variations on the theme for as long as we've been online.

Significant Other confronted the reality of the situation.

"For as long as I live, I will be making friends who are new to the Internet, and they will send me these things," she posited. "I can ignore them or I can tell them that they have been made to act foolishly." Significant Other is a woman of action. She has become proactive about dealing with email hoaxes.

Sensitive newbies who earnestly forward to her pleas for postcards to dying children are met with scorn. You are doing the work of rascals and con artists, she tells them. They are abashed, or hurt, or angry, or in denial about being duped. Some of them turn on her. Significant Other lives for email. She does not lose flame wars.

For as long as there are first-time users of the Internet (and that will be for the rest of all of our lives), there will be email hoaxes. They aren't really Spam, because they usually come to us from a friend or acquaintance. They are messages that play on our fears ("Beware of the Good Times virus") or our greed (Free Disney vacations!") or our sympathies ("He's dying of cancer and wants to set the world record for emails received.") They are false, but the unwitting do not want to take a chance.

New users of the Internet can save themselves a lot of grief, and perhaps the wrath of the Significant Other, by acquainting themselves with the best-known scams out there. What should you look for? Go check out the CIAC Hoaxes Page or Virus Busters. You'll soon know most common hoaxes on sight.

Significant Other, who lives for email, will thank you.

Please send questions or comments to web.editor@snet.net.