I'm still surprised at times when I get an e-mail forwarded to me that claims something is true without anyone having checked the validity of the contents. I recently got an e-mail regarding this Dr. Dobson Petition and there were almost 3000 names on it already when it came to me. To me it should be common practice to people to do a quick & simple internet search to find out more information before blindly forwarding stuff to everyone on your contacts list. Even if the e-mail already has a link attempting to validate the information, I'm going to want more than one source reporting the same thing. One person forwarding an e-mail with 0-1 sources does not validate the contents.
I will usually copy/paste some main part of the text into Google and I'll typically quickly find several resources that discuss the origin and validity of the information in the e-mail. Then I will reply to all on the e-mail I got and post a few of those links letting them know where to find more information and encouraging them to do likewise in the future when they get e-mails like this and are tempted to forward them to people. I would like to encourage your circle of contacts (friends, relatives, community, etc) to squash useless e-mail chains instead of fueling them. What the world needs now is more useful information and less useless information to fill up our in-boxes, bog down the mail servers, and waste our time reading the garbage.
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