Let me ask you a question: you get a letter in the mail box, delivered by a postman, asking you to send it on to ten friends or else you will get bad luck.

What do you do? Do you sit down, write out ten copies, get ten envelopes, ten stamps and then send the ten copies, or do you consign it to the ?round filing cabinet??

Most people would put their hands up and say, ooh, ooh, the bin!

Let me take you a step further: you get a letter into your email inbox, delivered electronically, telling you some sad sack story, bad news, virus alert, good news, whatever, and it asks you to send it on to everyone in your address book.

What do you do now? If you?re like every other average internet user you?ll go oh, I should pass this warning on, I don?t want to take the chance that a friend might get caught with this. So, you trawl through your address book, insert all those email addresses, hit send and whammo, you?ve just helped spread the latest (or oldest) email hoax.

Why do people do this? Why, because it?s easier to pass on a hoax and pretend to yourself that you are ?protecting? others, than it is to spend thirty seconds doing a cursory browser search for that email subject line.

I had a friend who sent me the java debugging email hoax. This hoax tries to encourage you to delete a legitimate Windows file from your computer. Jdbgmgr.exe is the file to which the hoax refers, and it is the Microsoft Debugger Registrar for Java.

Being of a suspicious mind when it comes to emails I ring Microsoft in Australia to find out if it is correct. When I ring my friend to advise her of this hoax, she wails down the phone to me, ?but I?ve already deleted it!?

So how do you know if you have a hoax or not. Well, a genuine virus/trojan/worm won?t tell you about it, will it? Hoax emails are designed to spread confusion, create unwarranted traffic with your ISP and clog up the system. They perpetuate and survive because people don?t use their commonsense and check before hitting that forward and send set of buttons.

If we all took sixty seconds to check, the world would soon see the end of hoax emails being spread. It?s probably like seeing the end of smallpox, if we educate ourselves, our friends, and everyone we knew about these they would soon stop. If we send back hoax information then we help to educate those who sent it to us in the first place.

Be considerate. Be careful. Be watchful, but most of all, be well educated for your own safety.