Easy. Quit making the mistakes that Internet Beginners make.
Bill Gates, AOL, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, Gap, Coca Cola, and any other company you can think of, are never going to send you money for forwarding an email to fifty of your closest friends, so don't believe it if you see it. Likewise, messenger programs like Yahoo and AIM do not need you to forward a registration message to keep your account active and free.
Nothing cool is going to happen on your screen if you forward an email to fifty of your closest friends, no matter what that email says. Except that forty of those friends are likely to quit reading emails from you.
The damage done by forwarding virus alert emails is worse than the damage the virus would have done. Especially for the viruses that "will totally kill your system and ruin it for good by low-level formatting your hard drive and overclocking the CPU to ten times normal speed." And after that, those viruses will raid the fridge, leave the toilet seat up, and steal your girlfriend to boot. Leave virus warnings to the virus experts, keep your virus software up to date, and be careful what attachments you open.
Any email that asks you to visit a website and punch in personal information--like bank account numbers, PayPal passwords, and social security number--is false. This is called Phishing, and is one of the major methods of identity theft.
Any email from "HoTBabE DoWnToWn," claiming to be able to hook you up with a really hot babe tonight, was actually written by a 39 year old guy in his underwear who lives in his mother's basement. He's probably the same guy who wrote any email claiming to be from Pamela Anderson, Angelina Jolie, Anna Kuornikova, or your neighbor's wife and daughter. And any of those emails promising to show you all kinds of naughty nastiness will be glad to do so, but only after you punch in your credit card number and a promise to spend your beer, lunch, gas, and date money for the next 7.4 years.
Pop-up windows offering to remove spyware from your computer were probably generated by spyware that needs to be removed from your computer. Clicking on them will install yet more spyware on your computer, until the whole system is so bogged down with advertisements and tracking programs that it runs as fast as a Commodore VIC-20.
There is no one in Nigeria with millions of dollars in the bank. And even if there were, they wouldn't be screaming to share it with you.
If an email arrives with a handy-dandy link at the bottom that says "Click here to be removed from this mailing list!"...don't bother. They left out the part that is supposed to say "When you do, we'll be glad to remove you from this mailing list, but since you're letting us know that this email went to a real live person and not a junk mail folder somewhere, we're going to go ahead and sign you up for our other 79 junk mail lists AND sell your address to twelve other companies...in the hope that you'll actually respond to one of them someday." Instead, use an Email Filter to automatically delete any future emails from this spammer.
At the same time, if you visit a really cool website, and it has a handy-dandy link that says "just enter in the email addresses of all your friends so that we can show them this really cool site, too!"...don't. Treat email addresses like phone numbers; would you put your girlfriend's phone number up on a restroom wall? The amount of spam you whistle into your inbox is your own business, but when you start signing up all of your friends and neighbors to receive it too, you're just asking to be put on the "email pariah" list.
DON'T TYPE IN ALL CAPITALS...everyone will think you're yelling at them. DoN'T tYpe IN MiXEd CapITAls aNd LoWEr, unless you want everyone to think you're fifteen years old. And anyone you think is fiftteen years old is in reality undercover police hunting for perverts looking for fifteen year olds online.
And last, never EVER put magnets on your CDs and DVDs, because it might ruin them.
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