Make it so: the CAN-SPAM Act
Irony is a beautiful thing. Congress recently attempted to control the electronic epidemic known as SPAM (via the CAN-SPAM Act) while lawyers continue to file lawsuit after lawsuit against known spammers. In 1997, e-mail surpassed traditional mail in messages sent, and experts believe that number to top 60 billion by 2006. Out of all the e-mail out there, approximately 40% of it is junk. Adding virus, trojans and other malicious emails to the list, the number can reach as high as 80%. Still, with all of the productivity and money lost, all of the complaints and annoyances, the general populace is contributing quite willingly to the problem. As the government and tech industry attempt to control the influx of useless, wasteful e-mail, the rest of the Internet occupies themselves with another type of junk: forwards.
That's right, folks, you are part of the problem. The irony is just this side of paradise: The whole of American and European is fighting to control junk email, while at the same time we continue to pass on countless junk email in the form of forwarded messages. Part of me doesn't want to stop my flow of random jokes and paltry Flash animations, but the other half knows there is a lack of knowledge among my readers. For the sack of explanation, however, a distinction must be made between the traditional chain-forward and the much more problematic e-mail hoax.
First, the ever-popular chain-forward, which general consists of a somewhat humorous joke, image or link to some sort of website. Taken strictly by the numbers, there is not a problem here, as chain-forwards constitute such a small fraction of junk e-mail as to not even be in most statistics. However, I do have one piece of advice: Instead of hitting the "Forward" button, as all seventeen people before you did, take five seconds to copy and paste the relevant information into a new message. Why, you ask? When you forward the message as-is, you're normally including a dozen additional messages with it—after a few rounds, the size of the message can add up quite drastically, causing your friends to open ten separate windows before they see your suddenly annoying message.
Second, and more importantly, the troublesome hoax. Whether it be a nice man from Nigeria needing somewhere to store a couple hundred grand, or some poor kitten being stuffed into glass bottles, let me give you a little nugget of secret knowledge: It's not real. If you haven't heard, the horror stories, read on...
The classic Nigeran 419 scam consists of a polite message desperately seeking your assistance. The author is generally of extreme importance and, therefore, ridiculously wealthy. He is attempting to flee his homeland and requires your help in transferring funds. While most people are aware enough to recognize the hoax, others get taken in, often transferring a "test" amount to an offshore bank, at which point the scammer disappears... along with your money and dignity. Others aren't so lucky, with some going so far as handing over their bank details or even traveling to meet the perpetrator and finding themselves held hostage for ransom.
The horror stories stemming from e-mail hoaxes are many and frequent. Luckily, there are some obvious signs to distinguish a true story from a hoax. In general, most of these messages hold some sort of urgent and important information, or so they claim. In reality, even the messages that are based on fact have long since been resolved, as the average lifespan of an e-mail chain letter is upwards of five years.
The most telling sign of a hoax is, ironically, the request to "send this to everyone you know." If the message truly originated from Microsoft or Bill Gates or any one of a dozen other popular sources, logic would hold that the sender would choose their audience. In all my years of life, I have never received a legitimate informative e-mail that requested I "pass it along."
There are, of course, other forms of hoaxes: Warnings and dire requests for help; the little girl dying of cancer; virus alerts or some sort of get-rich-quick plan; online petitions attempting to ban or encourage action (who, might I ask, would take an e-mail message with 15,000 anonymous, international names as a legitimate petition?). Most of these messages are started for the sole purpose of seeing how far the message will travel, with the original author hoping to someday receive the message back, unwittingly, from a friend. There are some instances, such as the Nigerian scam, where the objective is to scam another out of money or possessions. By far the most successful and annoying, however, are the flat-out-fictional stories—an inspirational, and false, story about Mel Gibson; fictional statements from Andy Rooney or Paul Harvey; how the fictional African Leopard Monkey Spider will kill you.
We come to the turning point, where you, the reader, must make a decision. You can take the high road, bookmark hoaxbusters.org and educate yourself... or you can take the low road, continue building on the problem—all the while complaining about SPAM—and proceed to habitually forward anything and everything which requests you do so. The decision is yours, the right to mock you for forwarding the latest hoax is reserved for myself.