Like most of us (I assume), I've had several old friends who got into the habit of sending random ridiculous claims by email to everyone in their contact lists.
For most, I used to always reply with appropriate debunking references (frequently that would simply be a snopes link). In some cases, that worked well, and they were trained to not be quite so gullible.
The fun ones were those who were so clueless that they sent their nonsense to a long list of people with all the email addresses in the clear instead of using bcc. In those cases, I would sometimes reply to all with the corrections.
...
This is something I feel very strongly about, and would nip in the bud, not only with an email reply, but often with a personal phone call to the sender, and demanding (yes - demanding!) they contact everyone on that list and warn them to not forward it either. I figured replying to all just might get that email forwarded too!
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And it wasn't so much about correcting the false info (though I would do that to demonstrate the problem), but because some (most? many?) of these email chains were originated by spammers who were trying to harvest active email addresses.
Back in the day when the kids were young, and we all shared a single family email address on dial up, our old email got so full of horrid spam, that I couldn't let the kids check email w/o me going in first and deleting the garbage. I suspect some of this came from those email lists, but I didn't want to take a chance.
My otherwise intelligent SIL sent me one "
I don't usually forward these, but..." and it went on about how forwarding the email would raise money for some orphan of the 9/11 attacks, or asking for donations or some such. A quick search showed it to be a scam, the boy did not exist, the original email address was shut down years ago, etc.
If it so important to share, send it to me separately, w/o sharing my email address with half the world. I don't trust them to use the Bcc properly, they might slip, forget, or have some other excuse - better to make them go through an extra 2 seconds of 'effort' before they forward it.
BTW - it worked. I don't get these crazy emails from anyone.
-ERD50