Friday, April 1, 2011

The Year Round April Fools

EG emails now. And texts. And IMs. We monitor her activity and want her to learn to use this technology responsibly. And she seems to be learning how to do that. Today, in response to a FORWARD!!!!, I sent her the following advice. Figured I'd share.

I love you. And I am proud of how smart you are. It is for this reason that I send this email.

As you venture into the virtual world of emails and the internet, I have a very serious piece of advice for you. It is a lesson all of us can stand to be reminded of.

TRUST NO FORWARDS. FORWARD NO FORWARDS WITHOUT VERIFYING.

For some unknown reason, people start these email forwards. They can be about anything. Like the one below, it has been forwarded so many times there is no way to tell who is writing it.

These emails usually claim to be about a close friend or relative. But even the ones that use real names of real people (usually famous people) are made up almost every time.

If you get one of these emails, you can read it, but do so with a lot of doubt. There is only a slim chance it is accurate or even true at all. If you think it might be true, you can research to try to verify it. For another unknown reason, some people started a website dedicated to verifying these forwards. It is snopes.com. There are others I am sure. I usually start with snopes.

In this case, a quick check of snopes shows that this email is not true. At best it is based on a singular incident out of India over 6 years ago. Just consider it an April Fools joke.

I love you.