http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/

Interspersed among the junk mail and spam that fills our Internet e-mail boxes are dire warnings about devastating new viruses, Trojans that eat the heart out of your system, and malicious software that can steal the computer right off your desk.

Added to that are messages about free money, children in trouble, and other items designed to grab you and get you to forward the message to everyone you know. Most all of these messages are hoaxes or chain letters. While hoaxes do not automatically infect systems like a virus or Trojan, they are still time consuming and costly to remove from all the systems where they exist.

At CIAC, we find that we spend much more time de-bunking hoaxes than handling real virus and Trojan incidents. These pages describe some of the warnings, offers, and pleas for help that are filling our mailboxes, clogging our mailservers, and that generally do not have any basis in fact.

 

The one chain letter that really burns me is the "mail system test" where you will get a $1 for ever person you forward the email to.
Naturally someone will forward it to "all employees" (one group name for all 11,000+ email address). this will be followed up with 50 people replying to all telling the original person this is a hoax and not to do that again, then 50 more people replying to all telling the first person to reply to not use reply all, and it kinda spirals downhill from there until IT steps in and locks the email server for two hours while they clean up the mess.