What to do when you get a chain forwarded email

This is a public service blog post.

Step 1)

Do not immediately forward this to all your friends/family/coworkers.

Step 2)

Skim the message enough to get the key idea and do a simple Google search to see if there are any web pages about this email. A good site to look at is snopes.com.

Step 3)

Assuming that the email is a hoax, misleading, old news, etc., reply to the sender (and optionally the other recipients) of this message about what you found. That will save everyone a lot of time.