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I’m pretty sure that all of us received FWD emails every now and then . Some of them are funny jokes, some are really nice, lovely and touching stories, and there are those silly chain emails, and the worst lot of it are the urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other such stories of uncertain or questionable origin (snopes).

When it comes to the worst lot of these emails, what do you usually do with them ? Do you:

1. Delete the email?
2. Forward the email?
3. Google and validate the story?

I for one, really detest those silly, rumour type of emails. Therefore, I will always google and try to validate the story. Once I found the proof that the story is a fake, I’d click “Reply All”, hoping to inform all the recipient of that particular email that the story is a hoax, and that it will deter them from spreading the story as well.

One day, this action of mine resulted in a little amusing drama within my Inbox. As usual, I received an email from this online friend of mine, about this particular story that happens back in my home country (not really going into the details of the email here). Well, it got my interest because it is a serious story, which would have resulted in the news, but I never came across any news mentioning about this incident at all. I have a gut feeling that it might be a rumour. Lo and behold, after much googling, I found proof that my instinct was correct.

So obviously my next step was to “Reply to all” and give them the link to proof that the story is a rumour and that they should stop spreading such nasty story. Well what do you know, I received a reply from this “friend” and he told me that his friends were not really happy with my reply and he sort of told me off for using his friends’ email addresses to spread to others and proof my knowledge, thus invading their privacies.

Now, I know I could have just deleted the email and be done with it but, like I said earlier, I just wanted to discourage others from spreading rumours and hoaxes. I’m not here to show off my “knowledge” . I think that comment was a little bit unjustified. If his friends were really so protective over their privacies, maybe they should advise him not to put their email addresses under the “To” section but rather under the “BCC” section when forwarding those absurd emails.