Amidst all the junk mail and spam that fill our Internet e-mail boxes are dire warnings about devastating new viruses, warnings which are misleading and tend to frighten. Added to that are messages about free money, children in trouble, cancer cures and other items designed to grab you and get you to forward the message to everyone you know.

Most all of these messages are hoaxes. While hoaxes do not automatically infect systems, they are still time consuming and costly to remove from all the systems where they exist.

Please do not spread chain letters and hoaxes by sending copies to everyone you know. Sending a copy of a cute message to one or two friends is not a problem but sending an unconfirmed warning or plea to everyone you know with the request that they also send it to everyone they know simply adds to the clutter already filling our mailboxes.

If you receive any of this kind of mail, please don't pass it to everyone you know, either delete it or check it out. You can and should get the warnings directly from the web pages of the organizations that put them out to insure that the information you have is valid and up-to-date.

Probably the first thing you should notice about a warning is the request to "send this to everyone you know" or some variant of that statement. This should raise a red flag that the warning is probably a hoax. No real warning message from a credible source will tell you to send this to everyone you know. Next, look at what makes a successful hoax.

There are two known factors that make a successful hoax, they are: 1) technical sounding language. (2)  Credibility by association.

If the warning uses technical jargon, much of which is not even correct, most people tend to believe the warning is real.

When we say credibility by association, we are referring to who sent the warning. If anyone, including the janitor at a large technological organization sends a warning to someone outside of that organization, people on the outside tend to believe the warning because the company should know about those things. Even though the person sending the warning may not have a clue what he is talking about, the prestige of the company backs the warning, making it appear real.

Both of these items make it very difficult to claim a warning is a hoax so you must do your homework to see if the claims are real and if the person sending out the warning is a real person and is someone who would know what they are talking about. You do need to be a little careful verifying the person as the apparent author may be a real person who has nothing to do with the hoax. Check the person's web site or the person's company web site to see if the hoax has been responded to there. Check the pages of these excellent hoax sites to see if they have already declared the warning a hoax: snopes.com, Symantec.com or hoaxbusters.ciac.com.