I have often repeated my disdain for pass-along e-mails. I'm not talking about situations where you see an individual news story or funny cartoon and decide to send it to a specific person who might appreciate it. I'm talking about the things that you send to everyone in your address book -- sappy stories, or chain letters, or self-righteous compliants about the state of society, or dire warnings of impending doom.

I get way too many of these.

Many of the ones that claim to be about factual situations -- virus warnings or stories about some other threat -- are either completely or partially inaccurate. I have long suggested that people need to check such stories out at the Urban Legends Reference Pages, snopes.com, before passing them along.

I'm not the only person who says such things, and now I've seen a few pass-alongs that anticipate the objection and say something like "Snopes says this is true" with a link to the page about that particular item at the snopes.com site.

Friday morning, I got an e-mail about a supposed new threat -- colored, fruit-scented crystal meth being given to children -- that included a Snopes link in the body of the e-mail. When I clicked on the link, it indeed took me to the Snopes site -- but, rather than confirm the story, Snopes said it was only partly true. Yes, there had been incidents where some colored and possibly even scented meth was confiscated. But there was no indication that it was being given to children, and the federal customs agent whose name and contact information are listed in the pass-along e-mail calls the e-mail "false and inaccurate" and actually has a disclaimer about it on his outgoing voice mail message because he gets so many calls.

The woman who'd sent me the message had already annoyed me -- she'd sent me a politically self-righteous pass-along a few weeks back, and after that one I told her to take me off her mailing list. I e-mailed her back repeating my request and pointing out that she was passing along bad information.

She said that my address had been re-added to her mailing list by mistake. She also told me that if I had young children I would be more concerned, and she didn't mind putting out partially-true information if there was even a chance that it would someday prevent a child from taking this stuff.

Well, let's look at that statement. If I had young children I would be concerned. I am already concerned, on behalf of my nieces and nephews. But if I thought something was a threat, what I would want is accurate information from a reliable source, not sort-of-accurate, word-of-mouth information which had been passed along (and possibly distorted along the way) by a million people with e-mail access. This woman basically told me that she didn't care that her information was half-baked as long as there was a chance it might someday be true.

Do you remember the story of the boy who cried "wolf"? If you send out enough alarmist garbage, pretty soon people start ignoring you. And then, when you have information about a real threat, people won't take it seriously. That is the real danger of these idiotic pass-along e-mails.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.