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Dynamic How-to: Tell if the Groundbreaking, Life-shaking, Earth-shattering Information You Received in a Forwarded Email is True

Posted by Ross Fale for Dynamic on 4 October 2011
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You know the forward I’m talking about; they usually touch on hot-button issues like the economy, money, politics, culture, various foreign countries or stories too seemingly good/horrible to be true.

In the spirit of clean inboxes and ridding the world of the unwitting passage of false or purposefully misleading information, I’ve compiled a list for you to run through when you encounter one of these emails. From this point on, you’ll never again have to forward that email in order to avoid seven years of bad luck.

Characteristics of a Forwarded Email Which Immediately Render its Veracity Suspect

1. It came to you via email.

2. The color of the text in the email is red, blue, or some color other than black.

3. It contains information about a subject you are very passionate about, yet the information is new and alarming to you.

4. There are more capitalized letters being used than lower case letters.

5. There are more exclamation points than periods.

6. It contains images that are irrelevant to the message within.

7. The email contains an ambitious promise that pledges to “enhance” some aspect of your life.

8. The email contains a subtle threat to your well-being should you decide NOT to pass it on.

9. The email contains information that would shake the foundations of the world if it were public, but it doesn’t source where that info came from.

10. You would not believe this information if it were scrawled on a bathroom wall.

11. The content in the email is sourced, but when you click on the links your virus scan has a heart attack.

The email I recently received was guilty of numbers 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6; however, what intrigued me was that the email included sources, which is arguably rare in the world of forwarding.

The message claimed that drilling for oil in parts of Montana/North Dakota would solve the United State’s oil shortage, and in fact could power the economy for no less than 2041 years! Amazing!

The two sources were a USGS press release and a website for an oil drilling contractor (the 2nd was in no way related to the message’s content). So, I checked the sourced press release and got the raw dig: the proposed drilling area contained an estimated 3.5 billion barrels of oil, and possibly more if they could find a reliable method to extract it. The United States, on the other hand, uses roughly 19 million barrels of oil per day. If you do the math, you learn that even if they were to extract every last drop, the known volume would only fuel the economy for approximaltey 170 days.

Two millennia versus six months? Margin of error, I guess.

The moral: be smart, be vigilant about what you pass along. It’s a good habit to get into.

If you want to streamline this process and not use my 11-point checklist, simply visit snopes.com or urbanlegends.com and search their database. They’ve been collecting and tracking false/true/partially misleading email forwards for over a decade. There’s a good chance you’ll find yours there.