As we know in the US, a good amount of right-wing rhetoric makes the rounds by people forwarding chain-emails containing dubious propaganda. This was especially evident in the 2008 US presidential election, where Obama had to fend off all sorts of weird accusations.
I have a few ways of dealing with these right-wing fail mails, the first one I've tried, the rest I haven't yet (ok):
- The easiest way is to send them to Snopes, but I like to send the link not just to the original sender, but to everyone they copied as well! Shame them for passing on such objectionable and spurious nonsense. They might not do it again. Or at least they might not send it to /you/.
- You not only have the email addresses of everyone who was copied when it was sent to you, but you can look down the thread to find any history of how it's been forwarded several times and email the debunking to everyone that was copied along the way. It wouldn't just be to keep them informed: all those people may have received the debunking several times already, but soon they'll get sick of being copied on the emails - even if they agree with them - if it means that they're going to receive the debunking every time it gets forwarded with their email address to someone else. They'll start asking whatever right-wing rumormonger they're friends with not to have these things sent to them in the first place and thus this will reduce circulation.
- Also useful in the history is to see who's been using their work email to forward them. They could get in big trouble for using work resources to spread these things, especially if they're racist. I've found cops' emails downstream in the forward thread; some cops have gotten suspended for forwarding these things. Big corporations and firms especially don't like their reputation tarnished by having their domain name and corporate logo show up in the signature of some overheated forward. You can use a WHOIS service on the web to find the abuse contact for their domain.