This is one of the first major studies of online deception phenomena. The book traces the beginning of hoaxing and its spread, with an in-depth account of its place as a genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC). In the context of genre studies, the book answers the question whether email hoaxes (EHs) satisfy the criteria to be subsumed as a digital genre. The book sets out to describe and analyze how the concept of genre relates to EHs, and how the label “hoaxing” is appropriate to the phenomenon. In the same vein, the book describes in detail genre antecedents of EHs and related discourse types, and how they may be incorporated into the model of hoaxing. It also explains how EHs may be disambiguated from other forms of “spam” products of CMC.

Heyd acknowledges that there is a great deal of research on genre theory and the hoaxing phenomenon. Much previous work has limited the concept of “hoaxes” in both spoken and written discourse and has adopted a more social-scientific approach, however. Heyd offers an elaborate account of the “communicative” purpose of EHs for the first time, a term that has become a focal point in genre theory in recent years. With a sizeable corpus of both representational and real-life data from online anti-hoax archives, selected on typology-based criteria, the author gives an outline and a description of the various types of e-mail hoaxes and their discourse features and structural elements.

The analyses are based on a linguistic/discourse analytical approach, consisting more of qualitative than of quantitative methodology and requiring the description of the forms of e-mail hoaxes, their pragmatic contents, and their communicative purposes. Analyses also include an in-depth account of their textual patterns, persuasive strategies, and narrative structures and sequences, which are systematically examined in order to account for the continued existence, spread, and proliferation of EHs. The author’s comprehensive pragmatic analyses of the data pay attention to the cooperative mechanism and speech acts in the message contents and how these strategies provide evidence of deception in the messages. Analyses also include a detailed description of the narrative structure of the EHs, how narrativity theories form the basis for a discourse study of EHs, and how these provide the foundation for the current study.

Email hoaxes as a genre study indeed provides a justification for considering EHs as a genre. The book is a well-researched study of e-mail hoaxing phenomena and will be very useful to all those interested in e-mail genre studies, computer-mediated discourse analysis, and pragmatics. This is one of the best accounts of this branch of computer-mediated communication in recent times.