If junk e-mail was that pink stuff in a blue can, there would be a
mountain of it in Northern Colorado. A 1995 "petition" that is reborn
every
couple of years as an e-mail chain letter hoax is back again, asking
NPR fans to send meaningless petitions to an e-mail address that
expired almost a decade ago!
I've just received a fresh copy of the petition. My name was on a list of 50 presumed public broadcasting
fans, many of them college faculty or professional journalists -- as is
almost everyone who has ever sent me a copy of this thing. (For online
hoax collectors, today's mail was a "Nina Totenberg said..." variation headed "Save NPR!" No sappy plea to "Save Sesame Street" this time.)
Since this piece of junk is back in circulation, watch your mailbox and be ready with
the "delete" key! I'd also consider returning a "sorry you got hooked by this"
message to the sender, although I'm afraid mine always sound
patronizing. My rule of thumb for any message that says "please send this
to everyone on your mailing list" is to assume that it's a hoax and
simply delete the message, no matter how sincere or high-minded it
seems. Online petitions are particularly pointless for a lot of reasons.
You can find out the truth about most e-mail chain letters or petitions
by picking a couple of key words ("NPR" and "PBS" in this case, or just
"Totenberg"), adding the words "spam" or "hoax," and feeding the
combination to Google. Or just browse around http://urbanlegends.org and http://snopes.com and feel relieved about all the junk mail you haven't gotten yet.
7:45:27 PM 
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