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I got one of those heinous forwarded e-mails last night from a friend who does not happen to share my political views. I won't go into the details of the mail, but it was apparent that it had been mindlessly forwarded a million times by people who had an ax to grind. It was defamatory in the extreme and it reeked with the stench of propaganda. As has become my custom, I "Snopes'd it" (Snopes.com) and discovered that my suspicions were correct -- it was a pack of lies.

The thing that surprises me about the incessant forwarding of some of these mails is that people that I know for a fact to be reasonably intelligent will fall for those "Aol, Bill Gates and Intel will pay us all a zillion dollars if we waste precious minutes of our lives filling our friends' inboxes with spam" mails.

Before you forward garbage to everyone in your address book, do them and yourself a favor: Go to Snopes.com and confirm its veracity. There are other websites that verify or dispel urban legends and stupid e-mails, but Snopes is my personal favorite.

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