This is a scratch page - I really haven't figured out how to approach this topic yet. What I want to do is provide a guide article for understanding and coping with hoaxes and legends, providing a thorough set of resources for handling them and developing a method categorising them all. Precisely how I am going to do that has yet to be determined, so I'm nestling it in a personal page for now.
Urban Legends and hoaxes - categories
- Chain Letters and variations
- Traditional Chain Letters
- Sympathy Letters and Requests to Help Someone
- Threatening chain letters
- Internet petitions
- The mythical "Email tracker"
- Free money/gifts from Microsoft/Nokia/etc
- See a cute video, receive a card
- Misinformation
- Distorted history for political/personal gain
- Evil corporations doing terrible things
- Computer virus warnings
- Truth taken out of context
- It was true once, but no more
No such technology exists. Examples - Microsoft, Applebee's, Honda, Nokia etc
Reasoning - in a number of cases people are asked to CC a particular address when they forward. It is suspected that this could be a method that spamming organisations use to obtain valid email addresses.