Email Hoaxes in the office

[SmiZ]

Sometimes it feels like a battle I can't win.

It seems like on a weekly basis, some AOL subscriber I work with gets an email that says "Needle found in McDonald's ball area" or "Forward this email and you'll receive $60,000,000 from Bill Gates" or "Take off your pants and jump up and down". They then proceed to print it out and post it on a bulletin board as if sent from God.

They figure that since it was forwarded to them by someone they know, it must be legit. I have tried numerous times to get them to realize that none of them are true. I show them the hoax sites where they explain they aren't true. I try logic and reason as to why you would have heard about it on the news if any of this were true. I even hit them over the head with my "Smarten the hell up bat" to try to get them to understand. Nothing seems to work.

Anyone else have this situation at their place of employement? Found a solution?

 

[iamwiz82]

shooting them on site in the leg usually stops all that nonsense, but it is generally frowned upon.

I usually email that person back and tell them if the forward another one like that, i will reveal the fact that they are using company email improperly to the uppermanagement. That really stops them.

 

[Daniel]

Not usually cause they at least sometimes have the sense to not send them. One time though we had a problem, and this is probably why they don't do this anymore. We are setup on a big exchange system where you go into contacts and it has everyone, a couple thousand people there, and the first line is "all". So a few people got stupid chain letters and proceeded to forward them to the "all" list, sending them to judges, state policy, etc, duh.

 

[warcleric]

It seems like the least computer saavy people always place the most trust in "information" they receive from the internet. I guess they are so used to blindly trusting the regular news media, that they figure everything on the internet has to be true.

 

[LadyNiniane]

IamWiz82 has the best suggestion - notify the sender that those messages are an inappropriate use of company computing resources. If they ignore you, you may need to report them to the next level supervisor (this assumes that your company has a policy on email usage).

You might also point them to the Snopes Urban Legend site and ask them to check out the story before sending it on.

Unfortunately, the worst offender around this office lately has been another consultant from my company. This client has a strict email usage policy and has been known to fire employees for repeat violations of that policy. Despite that knowledge, the jerk continues, sending what amounts to personal email forwards to all of the consultants at this site and a boatload of friends and family (a TO: list of more than two pages). After five different "joke" messages hit my box yesterday morning (at least two of which I considered to be "professionally demeaning" because of language or usage), I finally called our Ops manager and asked him to deal with it. I'm not a prude and I enjoy a good joke, but not on company time or using a professional email address and server.

Funny thing, I've haven't gotten anything from this twerp since then.

Lady Niniane