This morning we laughed at an email about a groom who stood up and exposed his cheating bride to 300 reception guests. Have you received this one too? Doubting the validity (though not the humor ) I quickly went online to see if this funny story was true. Keep reading for the story and whether it’s true. More importantly I’ll show you where to sniff out urban legends and keep from forwarding prank stories to 100s of your email friends ….only to receive angry replies calling you stupid for believing that Bill Gates, Microsoft and AOL would give away money to anyone who forwards an email to 100 of their friends.

Here’s part of the funny bridal email:

This is a true story about a recent wedding that took place at Clemson University. It was in the local newspaper and even Jay Leno mentioned it. It was a huge wedding with about 300 guests. After the wedding, at the reception, the groom got up on stage with a microphone to talk to the crowd.

He said he wanted to thank everyone for coming, many from long distances, to support them at their wedding. He especially wanted to thank the bride’s and his family and to thank his new father-in-law for providing such a lavish reception.

As a token of his deep appreciation he said he wanted to give everyone a special gift just from him. So taped to the bottom of everyone’s chair, including the wedding party, was a manila envelope. He said this was his gift to everyone, and asked them to open their envelope.

Inside each manila envelope was an 8×10 glossy of his bride having sex with the best man. The groom had gotten suspicious of them weeks earlier and had hired a private detective to tail them.

After just standing there, just watching the guests’ reactions for a couple of minutes, he turned to the best man and said, “F— you!” then turned to his bride and said, “F— you!” Then he turned to the dumbfounded crowd and said, “I’m outta here.”

Turns out the story dates back at least to 2002.

It may partly be true, though it largely is one of those chain emails that gets passed along from user to user.

Occasionally it re-appears when someone forwards the story to 100 (or 500) of their closest email friends.

Each person forwards it to another 100 of their friends (you’ll recognize the type of email by the number of times it’s been forwarded - usually having a to scroll down for 1/2 hour just to get by all the forwarded addresses and hit the true message text)

It’s a myth - in whole or part.

How did I find this out (more importantly how can you find this out before forwarding on a seemingly true email to groups of your friends)?

My top resource for separating online myth from reality is the online site http://www.snopes.com which publishes the text of the circulating email (or a variation) as well as a detailed explanation of why it’s a myth.

The Snopes web site maintains an extensive database of nearly every online urban legend. Visiting their site you can search by topic, view the latest 25 myths or just brows old funny legends.

Every time I receive on of those “oh my gosh” emails with a story that seems just too funny or outrageous to be true - I head right over to Snopes to check it out.

Keep this URL on hand and before you forward on any of those outrageous emails check out their validity at Snopes.com.