“Quick, pass this on to everyone you know!” - How to decide if you should.

Most of us have had e-mails that start off along these lines. The message then goes on to warn you of some dire virus that anti-virus programs are powerless to defend you against, or that you will go into a draw to win some marvellous prize if you pass the mail on to at least 8 more people, or that you must never open an e-mail from Joe Bloggs because that will enable him to take over your computer - and possibly even the world!

You realise that, in all likelihood, these e-mails are nonsense spam - but dare you take the chance? Or should you pass it on just in case? Well, it’s actually quite simple to check out the the truth of any such e-mails before you forward the good news to everyone in your contact book. All it takes is a quick search on Google.

The key is using “quotation marks” in your search. First of all copy a line from the suspect e-mail and paste it into the search bar of Google - then surround the text with quotation marks.
For example: “IF A PERSON CALLED SIMON ASHTON”
The use of quotation marks forces Google to look for exact matches to that phrase. If it is a hoax you will soon find that your search returns plenty of sites letting you know about the hoax and its history. The above search returned nearly 800 sites detailing this particular hoax - which I received just before writing this article. Another mail that I received about a week ago has been doing the rounds since 2000!

Tip: It’s a bit quicker if you copy the text, enter the opening quotation mark in the search box, then paste the text and insert the closing quotation mark.

For a taster of the kind of stuff that’s going around take a look at the ‘Urban Legends‘ section of about.com