The trash folder in my main inbox hit 4000 today. Since I never throw anything out, I know that what's in there is courtesy of my email filter which is set to automatically delete anything that is forwarded from my work account from a certain person. That "person" is our spam filter that insists on sending me, the administrator, a notification when it blocks an email. It's also set to delete some other mail automatically, those would be that come from addresses that have sent me spam. So I have 4000 of these in my trash. Yippee.

The compulsion to hit the forward button is alive and well even with the plethora of information available on the web about the downside of doing just that. But I have a theory.

According to one website I visited "The rate of growth of Internet use in the United States is currently two million new Internet users per month." 2 MILLION new internet users a MONTH?? It all makes sense now. There are too many newbies out there running amok with a computer, a mouse and an internet connection clicking the forward button!

But who can blame them really? Before I learned the downside of forwarding this cyberjunk and more importantly, learned that most of it isn't even true, I was among the forwarding faithful, sending on mountains of useless information to everyone I knew as quickly as it arrived.

Perhaps it was the first thing I got that I knew wasn't true that turned on the light bulb, or perhaps it was the first thing I got that just didn't make any sense, after all, who in their right mind would believe that Bill Gates was sitting around tracking forwarded emails and would actually pay you if you "passed it on"? I may be gullible, but that one was just too hard for me to swallow.

I started to look into these warnings and threats and found that the majority of them were either not true at all, like the Bill Gates hoax, or, if they were true, they were so out of date that they were no longer relevant, like the Phenylpropanolamine Drug Warning which continues to make it