Hoax emails

A lot of people that are new to using email come accross some kind of warning sooner or later that they think is so important that they feel they have to forward it to as many as possible people as they can and even disregarding the rule not to post off-topic messages to mailing lists.

Most of these messages concern virus warnings or something that's very socially unjust or sympathy deserving.
Generally these stories are 'urban legends' however and they circulate the Net every couple of years because there are always new people that don't know them yet.

When you forward such a message you'll be immediately know as a newbie...

(Partial list of) know hoaxes:

A4F-Spoof trojan
AOL4FREE.COM hoax
Bud Frogs warning
Cancer chain letter
Deeyenda Maddick
EYES.EXE
FATE3.0 warning
Francesca chain letter
GHOSTS.EXE
Good times
Hacker Riot
Hackingburgh
Independence hoax
Irina
Join the Club
Join the Crew
Matra R-440 Crotale April fools joke
Meme or Anti-CDA hoax
Microsoft home page hoax
NaughtyRobot
Penpal Greetings
PKZIP300
Returned or Unable to Deliver hoax
SHEEP.EXE (new info)
YUKON3U.mp JPG hoax

Here are sites with much more information:

ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACChainLetters.html	CIAC Chain Letters
ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html	CIAC Hoaxes
kumite.com/myths/	Computer Virus Myths home page
vil.mcafee.com/villib/alpha.asp	McAfee
www.av.ibm.com/	At IBM
www.av.ibm.com/BreakingNews/HypeAlert/	At IBM
www.cert.org/	CERT (from Computer Emergency Reponse Team) at Carnegie Mellon
www.ciac.org/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html	CIAC Hoaxes
www.europe.datafellows.com/news/hoax.htm	Datafellows Hoax alert site
www.nai.com/services/support/hoax/buddylst.asp	Norton Associates International
www.sophos.com/virusinfo/scares/	Sophos
www.symantec.co.uk/avcenter/data/	Symantec UK
www.symantec.com/	Symantec, makers of anti virus software
www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html	Symantec, Hoax page
www.tu-berlin.de/www/software/hoax.shtml	In German

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