I feel bad, but I see it as my duty, as a responsible email user, to reply to friends’ hoax forwards. Not the joke forwards or the spam, but the “SAVE NPR!” and “BOYCOTT EXXON!” and “PASS THIS ON TO 10 FRIENDS!!!” emails, the ones that ask you to propogate the cycle of bandwidth consumption.

I always try to make my emails as delicate as possible: I never attack the sender, just point them to the article on snopes.com that debunks the email, and recommend using the website as future resource. People still get defensive sometimes, which probably has to do with the fact that I hit “reply all.” I know, I know: maybe that’s a bitchy thing to do, akin to standing up at a crowded restaurant and shouting to the person who’s talking, “it’s LIES! ALL LIES!,” but the only way to keep the email in question from making the rounds another million times to make sure that everyone who got it knows that it’s crap. I always copy the two mile long list of emails into the BCC: line, but I’ve still had some good friends get very defensive.

“But, it’s a good cause,” is the most frequent defense offered, huffed over email. Sure, NPR is a good cause — but that email has been making the rounds since 1995! That email has been around longer than Yahoo!, Amazon, AND MSN. It’s, like, 200 years old in internet-years.

Still, I think it’s my duty: as someone who knows how to spot a web hoax when I see one, it’s my job to share the information and teach the masses that when something says “FORWARD ME,” you probably shouldn’t. After all, isn’t sharing information what the internet is all about?