Do you "correct" emails sent to you?

[bumbershoot]

I once went a little too far with this.

My aunt constantly forwards emails. Mostly the really superficial ones, but she has sent a few that I found offensive (Obama is a secret Muslim, anyone?). I usually just delete, but I was starting to get really annoyed. There was one with all these "facts" about immigration. At the end of the email it said something along the lines of "If you don't believe, check it out for yourself" and then gave a bunch of links. Well, I went through each "fact" and corrected it using only information from the provided links. I probably spent 2 hours reading through all of the information and writing up numbered responses for each of the facts.

I hit "reply all" and said I couldn't believe some of these facts so I decided to visit the links and then provided the accurate information for each of the "facts". My aunt never responded.

I did that once with my stepbrother, and another time with my stepdad and his wife (my mom is dead). Stepbrother never wrote again, probably b/c I told him that if he couldn't keep himself from writing and sending junk like that, he should probably take me out of his address book (it was a REALLY offensive email, hitting religion, culture, countries, his lack of historical knowledge, and politics all with one fell swoop based on some silly picture of a flag with light refracting through it in the shape of an X (or a cross as he saw it)). Stepdad and his wife have written, but don't forward junk onto me, not since I replied all with a huge letter similar to what you did.

I just HATE the idea of the nonsense getting out there, taken as truth. The one I replied all to was about half fact, but the half not fact was ugly and nasty, and was just so ridiculous that anyone would believe it if they thought for one second about it, but since they hadn't thought about it, I didn't think their recipients would either.

 

[Stacerita]

A friend of my mom's will send all sort of emails that are just fake. She also will send them over and over again. Every few months she will resend one that she had sent before. The only way to get her to stop is to correct her in a reply. I usually won't do it the first time.....but by the fifth time she sends it to me, I correct her.

 

[JDinCO]

Two different people I know sent me the same fwd about the dollar coin not having In God We Trust so I quickly corrected them. But normaly I just delete thier junk before reading it but to correct them felt good.

 

[Alex2kMommy]

My aunt and FIL send a lot of these junk emails. At first I was checking them on Snopes and sending the email back to the offender, along with the Snopes link to the correct information. My aunt, to her credit, sent along to everyone a corrected email with the Snopes link, but it did seem to be getting on her nerves. Instead of skipping me on the junk mail distribution, she continued sending them along saying, "I've checked this out on Snopes and it's true!" I checked on a few of them and part of the story was true, or some such half-truth.

I gave up, and just delete the emails from her with the "FW:" in the title.

 

[Nancy]

delete is my friend. I couldn't be bothered looking it up and snopes and taking the time to send it back. Usually I just look at the title line and go no furthur.

 

[Eeyores Butterfly]

It really depends. I hate the thought that I might be irritating someone, but if an email really gets my goat I will send the snopes link.