Kongtechnology.com

Urban Legends – How To Tell Whether An Email Is A Hoax?

Posted: 04 May 2010 03:13 AM PDT

It so happens that I just got one of those emails. The title of the email says “Are Leftover Onions Poisonous?” Now what do I do? Do I forward it to my friends and ask for their opinions? And appear stupid if it turned out to be a hoax?

Truth or lie?

Nah, I’ll just ask Big G - which you all know as Google – and search using these parameters:

“urban legend Leftover Onions Poisonous” (keyed in the search box without the apostrophes) OR

“urban myth Leftover Onions Poisonous”

*If you keyed in the above without “urban legend/myth”, you will find many who received the same email and who are now wise (or so they think!) are warning their dear friends/readers of their doom bringing habit.

And If you have time to kill, they are pretty interesting read.

If you did the search above to check out the results, then you will see that according to Google’s results, this is a HOAX; and you will find that many has written about this in the past.

Explanation:

You can search using the “urban legend/myth” parameters above because, in the internet, a hoax (in email, esp) is known as URBAN LEGEND/MYTH! There are also lesser known terms but these 2 are the most important.

There is many a website whose sole existence is to keep track of these things because these emails bugged the hell out of a lot of people too.

Conclusion:

I have suspected it but now it’s confirmed 100%! So the guy who forwarded this was either a postman or courier for DHL. That’s why he didn’t check the message before resending it to lots of his friends. Oh but then again he can’t, he was NOT ALLOWED to do it in his previous job.

But, YOU, my dear reader, is more savvy than that. You know that emails that

-ask to be forwarded to as many people as possible (esp when they are religious in nature)

-will cause you untold misery if you don’t forward them; but will bring you luck if you do

(I am pretty sure of this cause NONE of my family members died since I started discarding Chain letters)

-didn’t pass my built-in common-sense filter (like this one)

are the FIRST emails you discard.

NEVER send them to your friends if you don’t want them recommending you for vacancies at POS Malaysia. This habit of deleting emails alone, practiced often, will make you appear more internet savvy among your friends!