Because not enough people know how. (Do not confuse with 'Snoop'. I do not (publicly) condone nosiness)
Step 1; Open your email. This is essential, as all articles requiring snope-ing come from your email. Remember, if you are at a public access computer, sign out before you leave. After your email is opened, please delete junk mail as necessary. If any mail is obviously junk, it does not require snope-ing and therefore can be deleted without wasting your time.
Step 2; Read your friend's messages. And your boss's. There might be important stuff in there - you never know. It's a good idea to read them at least once a week, though people with more obnoxious or important contacts might find it necessary to read more often.
Step 3; Determine which emails need snope-ing. For inexperienced snope-ers, this may be the most difficult step, so I will provide hints and tips to help.
- Look for emails that were not written by your friends. Obviously the person who sent you the email was your associate, but if the person who actually took the time to type out the blather is someone else, the email is probably snope-able.
- Look for stories. ("A friend of mine in Nebraska went to the playroom at MacDonalds one day and..." or "This happened a few years ago at a New York publishing house....") Story-emails, not written by an associate, are definitely snope-able, whereas non-story emails are rarely snope-able.
- Look for forwarding. Generally, anything forwarded more than once is junk on sight, and does not even need to be snoped to prove it. Glance at the message, just in case it's a forward between different offices at your company, but if not don't even bother. Similarly, look for emails that state "we will donate X-money to X-charity for every times this email is sent out." As the technology to accomplish this is illegal (Under unrightful invasion of privacy), this is not possible.
- Look for anything that requests forwarding the email on. Story emails, lame joke emails, and "...or the phone will ring in the middle of the night and you will wake up with the masked villain standing over your bed with a knife covered in your parents blood" emails all seem to ask you to send them on to your associates. All of these, with an excpetion to the jokes, are snope-worthy.
Step 4; Visit Snopes.com and search for your snope-able email. In the search box, you should be able to copy-and-paste in the first line of the email. The first response should be your snope-able email - if not, re-copy the search term with quotations around it.
Step 5; Check the email's status. Once you have come to the page on your paticular email, and confirmed that this page is indeed about the email you recieved, check the status. The status indicator is just above the grey example box, and below the short synopsis. The status should either be True, Multiple, Undetermined, Status pending (No status), or, in most cases, False. After the status has been checked, you can read about Snopes research on the email and so on and so forth.
(Obtional step 6; Reply to All about your new findings. Tell your poor friends what you have discovered! I'm sure they would either be glad to know they were mislead or hate you entirely for it. Either way, it's a good idea to make sure they know the truth, as it would be a bad idea to let the false emails spread like wildfire.)
Congratulations! You are not a Novice snoper! With practice, you can become an experienced snoper, and everyone will look up to your talent. Don't let this ability die with you - teach your friends, if they are willing, how to snope. Soon, every false email will have been eliminated, and the world will be a better place for it.
