“Forward this e-mail and get $1000 from Bill Gates”
“…and get a free pair of cargo pants from The Gap”
“…and save the life of this pathetic sick kid”
“…and get a free Toyota”
Look Aunt Mary, I’m sorry I insulted you this morning by pointing out snopes and asking you to take me offa your spam distribution list. But for the love of all that is sweet and holy you’ve been online for more than 5 years now. I know because I remember your first e-mail to me. You have no excuse for forwarding this bullshit.
Because it said to forward it in the email. Seriously. For many people that is the only reason they need. I asked an email acquaintence of mine why he sent it to me. “Because it said to forward it to all my friends”. :rolleyes:
What really gets me is not that these people forward the idiotic message, it’s that they get so angry when you point out the fakery. No matter how nicely I tell them, they still get all self-righteous. I cannot TELL you how many times I got that “Save Sesame Street!” e-mail, and every time I politely told the sender it was a hoax and sent a link. Damn near every time the response was, “I wasn’t sure if it was true or not, but I figured it was better to send it just in case. God, I was trying to do the right thing, why are you giving me a hard time?!?”
Don’t be a lazy moron-- check the thing out before you clutter countless inboxes with bullshit. And don’t kill the messenger-- I’m trying to help you not be duped by what are basically virulent little memes of falsehood. Please!
I once made the mistake of cc-ing the other recipients of the list with the explanation and link, and not only did I get shit from the original sender, but also from a bunch of the other people. Some were just clueless (“I didn’t send you this message!”) but plenty were mean. I think they were upset that I spoiled their little fantasy of magically making the world a better place simply by copying and pasting a bunch of email addresses.
Never again. The first time I get it, the person gets a message informing them that I don’t prefer to receive forwarded email. The next time, they go into the kill file. Except my Mom. I just don’t have the heart to cut her off.
Some of them I just delete with a sigh. Some of them get a reply explaining that it’s a hoax, or it’s not possible, or they shouldn’t worry about the poor kid because she doesn’t exist, or something like that. Usually they learn after a couple of tries. I don’t know if they stop sending them altogether or just to me, but as long as I’m not getting them I can’t do any more than that. The ones that get me, though, are the ones who tell me, “I knew it wasn’t real but I sent it anyway.”
Yesterday, a cow-orker sent me the “chicken head in a box of McNuggets” picture. I sent her the snopes story (which is FOUR YEARS OLD). She ignored it by saying, “Well, it could happen.”
A friend of me mum’s sent everyone on her contact list the “Ether robbers in the Wal*Mart parking-lot” warning last month. I replied (to all, as naturally she wouldn’t use the BCC field for a mass mailing) with a politely worded ("Just to set your mind at ease-- This is an urban legend…) message with a link to Snopes and advice to check there before forwarding any messages, especially any that beg to be forwarded to everyone you know.
She replied saying “it actually happened to a friend of the person who forwarded it me, so I guess it isn’t an urban legend any more.” (Ha!) And besides, her husband saw something on the news about it. Eesh. After I pointed out that the message that she sent was word-for-word the one on the Snopes link, except with regional details changed to appear local, and pointed out that it had been in the news, sort of, by providing links to news stories about the viral e-mail, and how it was a hoax, and how it really is impossible to render someone unconscious with a quick sniff, she finally relented. She so desperately wanted for there to be sinister guys out there laying women out with sniffs of bunk perfume, though. I’m sure it broke her heart to find out it wasn’t so.
I do hope I was just condescending enough to make her think about the possibility of further embarrassment from forwarding crap like that to anyone. I guess I’ll be happy enough if she just took me out of her address book, though.
There’s got to be something that can be done about the hopelessly gullible, though. Maybe a mass e-mail campaign saying that if you forward the message to 50 of your closest friends, and then boil your head, an angel will get its wings.
Heh. I had a similar experience, sort of. I REPLIED TO ALL since the email was from someone I’d never heard of and, quite frankly, didn’t see the need for all these poor people to believe this crap.
I included the link to snopes, I mentioned that it was COMPLETELY untrue, I even included a helpful tutorial on how to look stuff up on snopes BEFORE you send out these emails.
I then said something to the effect of, “and in any case, please don’t forward these messages to everyone on your email list again - all it does is clutter peoples’ inboxes and annoy them. Thanks.”
I got an email back from the sender ranting and RAVING at me, saying stuff like “How did you get my email address? Why are you sending me this nasty email? I have no idea who you are - delete me from your email contacts IMMEDIATELY.” Um, duh? So I sent an email BACK saying, “YOU sent this crap to ME, lady - and I sent the reply to EVERYONE saying it was FAKE. Just don’t forward that stuff, and we’ll be OK. And by the way, how did YOU get MY email address?”
Turns out Ms. Clueless Git did a “REPLY TO ALL” on an email from one of my co-workers in order to SPAM us all with this crap.
Meanwhile, since Ms. Clueless Git was sending everything to EVERYONE on the original list (I assume she was just copy-and-pasting everyone’s emails into the .cc list every time, since I did a REPLY instead of REPLY TO ALL - no need to fill up everyone else’s box with this crap), pretty much everyone else was getting REALLY hacked at her and privately sent me thank you notes saying they were tired of getting that urban legend SPAM in their inbox and they’d never heard of snopes but they’d tell all their friends and families about it, and REPLYING TO ALL in order to slam Ms. Clueless Git.
So mine turned out WAY better.
The most frustrating one, though, came from my mom. Especially frustrating for her. It was the “delete this file” that screwed up your computer if you deleted it. So she forwarded the email without checking it, then followed the instructions given, deleting the file, emptying the recycle bin, and rebooting. “But it came from my PASTOR! I thought he’d know!” I then pointed out that just because he’s a Pastor doesn’t mean he knows squat about computers…and in the wake of that fiasco it turned out SHE knows WAAAAAY more than he does, so she checks EVERYTHING with snopes now before sending. Yay mom!
Fortunately her system has a “recovery” feature on it so that you can still “undo” some of your latest errors, even after a reboot, so it was pretty simple to get the file back.
Seriously, folks, don’t do the reply to all thing. You’ll just make enemies that way. The few people that you educate will be far outweighed by the people you hork off.
My uncle used to send out this kind of crap. I did a reply to all for each one. Finally, I stopped getting them. Did I educate my uncle? No. Turns out he still sent this stuff out, he just removed me from his mailing list.
My sister sent me this one. It was also sent to the rest of my family and to a number of people I didn’t know.
I replied to all, saying that it would probably be best to investigate emails like that before deleting parts of her operating system and linked to Snopes. She stopped sending them to me for a long while… then sent me this one. I replied to the person that sent it to her, with a cc: to her, saying “Wrong!” With a link to Snopes… She was a little upset that I responded to her boss.
I only do a reply-to-all if the e-mail is dangerous (“If you have [file Windoze needs to function] on your system, you have a virus and you must delete it immediately!”) or if it impugns a reputable organization (“The Nationally Known Dread Disease Foundation will help this poor little girl, but only if she can get enough people to forward this e-mail, becase the NKDDF are all about dangling money under the noses of people suffering from dread diseases in order to make them jump through stupid, nonsensical hoops for our amusement.”)
I just can’t let stuff like that pass without comment. I don’t care who gets pissed off. It pisses me off when people dump their unverified crap in my inbox in their relentless quest to propagate bullshit. If anyone’s widdle feelings get hurt, and it makes them think the next time they reach for the forward button, then good.
After an extensively researched reply-to-all regarding a hoax involving the American Cancer Society, which included a link to ACS’s donation page (" . . . if you want to make a REAL difference in the fight against cancer. . . ") my sister stopped forwarding glurge, or at least stopped forwarding glurge to me. Frankly, I don’t care which.
What I hate the most are the religious chain mails. You know, the ones that tell some lame story about some poor lost soul who suddenly found God, and at the end it says something like, “Do you believe in the Lord? Forward this to 10 people if you do. If you don’t, you obviously don’t care about anybody and you’re a loser.” Those go riiiiiight into the trash when I get them. I have a hard time believing that I’ll be damned for all eternity just because I didn’t forward a badly-spelled chain mail to everyone on my address list.
It happens because people like my Mom are getting on the internet for the first time every day.
Thankfully, my Mom has no idea how or desire to use the inter-web (her word!). She still fully believes that if she pushes the wrong button that she’ll blow up a computer.
Well yeah, there are those. When my uncle forwarded the one about how you can prevent a heart attack by coughing the right way, I replied to all, saying “Stop coughing and dial 911.” Being that the forward was to a lot of men who had some risk factors, I figured it was better to have live relatives who hate me rather than dead relatives who love me.