How do you confirm or expose email hoaxes?

Answer 1

It's probably safest to assume EVERYTHING is a hoax, unless it comes to you from someone you trust and know not to be gullible who personally assures you by name that they've checked it out and it appears to be real.

Snopes is a pretty good site for this sort of thing. The operators of the site are not at all gullible, and they check out things people forward to them... it's a good bet yours will already be there.

There are some common features of hoaxes: anything claiming you won a contest you don't specifically remember entering is a scam, anything claiming you can win something or help some sick child just by forwarding the email is a hoax, anything asking for some trivial donation like soda can pop-tops is almost certainly either a hoax or a distortion, and if not it's probably referring to some specific promotional event that happened several years ago. Things about missing kids tend, unfortunately, to be true, though generally hopelessly out of date: if it's real and current, you'll be seeing it on posters at businesses and on the news, not just in email.

Anyhow, go to the Snopes site and look at the ones there; just doing that, and reading the descriptions of the ones that are definitely known to be hoaxes (and the ones that are loosely based on reality), will arm you a lot better for quick triage into "definitely phony" or "might possibly be real" of future email you get personally.

One caveat... while there's very little on the site that's actually obscene (and probably nothing in the section I specifically linked to), some of the sections have to do with topics that might not be safe for work, and rather more may not be appropriate for young children. It should be pretty obvious which ones these are; they're usually pretty clearly labelled.