Don't you love to open your e-mail and see a ton of notes forwarded by well-meaning friends telling you all about dangerous new viruses, lost or sick children who need you to forward this e-mail so they can be found or get medical help, or stores and companies that will send you cash or merchandise for forwarding this or that e-mail to the most people?

Well, hey, "reality check." Businesses don't do business by e-mail! Nor do police departments check their e-mail for missing persons reports. Ever hear who the big winners were from any of these e-mails?

You can relax; there is no need to pass it on "just in case it's true" or because someone, four generations back, said "we checked it out and it's legit."

There is no "Good Times" virus. There also is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny either. There is a W32/santa, Kak.worm and a PWSteal virus/trojan though, but do you recall seeing any e-mails about them? If you did, I'll bet you subscribe to a virus newsletter.

The "Make a Wish" foundation is a real organization doing fine work, but they had to establish a special toll free hot line in response to the large number of Internet hoaxes using their good name and reputation.

Did Bill Gates give you $1000 for forwarding the most e-mail? Did The Gap send you free clothes?

Did you hear about the kidney theft ring in New Orleans? The National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly issued requests for actual victims of organ thieves to come forward and tell their stories. None have. Not even your friend's cousin's cousin's friend that it "actually happened to."

Bottom Line? Composing e-mail or posting something on the Net is as easy as writing on the walls of a public restroom and just about as accurate. ASSUME it's false, unless there is proof that it's true.

Now, for those of you who have e-mail friends and would like to keep them, here is a list of excellent web sites that will assist you in sorting out what's truth and what's not.

These four Web sites deal with virus hoaxes and are all excellent and very up-to-date:

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/scares

• http://www.datafellows.com/virus-info/hoax

• http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html

• http://korova.com/virus/hoax.htm

These sites deal with virus truth and if you see it here, it's for real. In most cases, if you see a virus alert on one of these pages, they will also supply you with a fix for it if and or when it is available. Ever see an e-mail that did that??

• http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/index.html

• http://www.antivirus.com/vinfo

• http://www.sophos.com

Cert is the Melon-Carnegie Institute. They keep track of program and operating system security problems and you can subscribe to their excellent news letter. Their Web site can be found at:

• http://www.cert.org

The McAfee Web site lets you subscribe to their newsletter and they will send you relevant information.

• http://www.mcafee.com/subscribe/beginI.asp

Wish.org is the Make A Wish Foundation web site. They publish hoax info that affects their foundation.

• http://www.wish.org

Urbanlegends and Snopes deal with all the rumors about false giveaways, the kidney snatchers, aids infected hypodermic needles left in theater seats or in coin return slots at phone booths, etc.

• http://urbanlegends.about.com/culture/urbanlegends

• http://www.snopes.com

The Microsoft support page will keep you up-to-date on operating system problems and other Microsoft product problems and supply fixes as they become available.

• http://support.microsoft.com/directory
Oh, one last thing. All those, "here's an e-mail angel for you." Go on. Make a wish. Any wish. Ha!Ha!, Not that. It also won't change the odds of you winning the lottery one bit. Get the picture??? Ok. Now, . . . 86 it.

Correction
One last thing. I need to correct a little misinformation that I dispensed last month. Sometimes my brain gets too far ahead of my fingers and bad things happen. Specifically, I'm referring to one of the firewalls I was talking about. I called it Zonealert and

the actual name is Zonealarm. At least the URL was correct and I'm sure you are all intelligent enough to have figured that out for yourselves if you went to their Web page. Sorry.