A legitimate virus warning e-mail will provide a date of its discovery, who discovered it and where a fix can be found. Without dates included, the hoax is liable to circle the Internet and your company year after year such as the Good Times Virus hoax. The virus warning will have not have references to official sources. The Internet is well known for spreading rumor and gossip. For those who want to ensure their message is taken seriously, they document their warnings with URLs and real contact names of people and organizations for more information.
Hoaxes are empty of any such substance.
Again, official virus warnings never request such behavior from a reader of the alert. You could also risk retaliation from recipients who are annoyed because you wasted their time. A recipient might also go the official route and complain to your company s administrator. It is far better to send a copy of the warning e-mail to your systems administrator or technical managers and ask them if it is real. Most of them are hoaxes anyway.