Before forwarding e-mail...visit this site!
 

This is a combination vent/consumer alert/instruction post.

Tonight I found in my inbox the latest heart-tugging forward begging me to pass it on because there was a darling baby with leukemia dying and money would be donated. I visited (this is the instruction part) http://snopes.com and sure enough, it is a great big hoax.

Before you forward the latest medical alert/get a gift certificate from the Gap/save this missing child email, PLEASE visit this site and see if it is legit. Don't clutter up your friends' inboxes with a bunch of ridiculous crap that 95% of the time has no basis in fact. It's impolite and inconsiderate - I mean, would you send junk mail to your friends? That's what you are doing. Oh, and if you have a friend that does this (whose name you cringe at every time you see a new email from them) direct them to this site.

This post brought to you by the Foundation to Keep Crap off the WWW, Inc.

From my experience and others I've talked to who are security buffs, don't answer any spam mail--even if they ask you to reply if you want to unsubscribe--and don't forward any chain e-mails, etc.

The best rule is to delete w/o opening any mail you don't want. The latest wave of viruses can be activated in Outlook Express in the preview pane, even if you don't open the email.

At some point you should invest in a good anti-virus package and if you use broadband (i.e., cable modem or dsl) you should get a firewall like Norton's Internet Security.

You'd be amazed how many port scanners there are on the net scanning the major ISP carriers looking for places to access. I use AOL and get about 3 to 5 probes a night that my security program blocks.

I got that email from my sister, and I thought that it was fake. I told her so and she agreed so we didn't forward it.
I like this site. Check out the part about college urban legends. Some might be familiar.