It’s interesting how many of the e-mail forwards I receive, once inspected on Snopes.com, turn out to be complete BS. The ratio is something like 90%.
My questions is this . . . what satisfaction do the original senders get? At least with SPAM, they are hoping to get financial gain from the whole thing. There’s really no measurement they can make to see how much their BS e-mail has spread, and even if they can . . . why? So that one day 3 months later they can receive the forward from one of their friends and say “YESSSSSS!”?
I must say that the clear winner as far as what I have received was that retarded “Bill Gates is sharing his fortune” e-mail, I received that at least 20 times. Made me lose a bit of respect for the sender for not seeing through it every time.
I suppose the satisfaction could be to simply have Snopes create an entry for something that you started.
Actually, the way it works is that once a piece of bullshit glurge gets forwarded past a certain magical threshold number, Bill Gates gives the originator $1000.
I wonder why I bother to check snopes and send the senders a refutation - I do it every time, but NEVER get any props. Why? because I know NOBODY except for internet AOL LOSERS WHO do not care. They just send me the next bullshit report, smiling all theway…
I’ve done that several times with a certain family member. She either didn’t read my reply or is impervious to embarrassment. After that, I asked her nicely to write me a personal note if she wanted to keep in touch, not forwarded bullshit. Didn’t faze her. So now I just delete everything that comes from her.
Some people just don’t get it- whether it’s subtle or glaring.
I always refute the crap political stuff I receive from a couple of extreme right-wing relatives by referring them to Snopes, because most of the things they send me to bolster their raving rightie beliefs are phony. I don’t get that much from others, except for the occasional joke, cartoon or funny photo. And that stuff I encourage.
For whatever reason(s) my volume of such trash has dropped to almost none. I may get that sort of thing twice a year (he says, knowing the Fates have been tempted to deluge him with 100 today!) and when I do it’s from well-meaning if not overly diligent friends and relatives. After sending them links to Snopes or Symantec showing the thing was a hoax, on maybe a dozen or less, they got the idea to check there first before alerting everybody in their address book about the latest fright.
I still get occasional glurge from one cousin who just plain doesn’t get it, but she doesn’t send the hoaxes. Just Glurge and Power Point things I can’t read anyway.
I consider myself fortunate to be out of that loop.
I get forwards like this from three particular people. I think it’s a combination of superstition (forward or else), some genuine belief in the sentiment and desire to pass it on (God loves you, the empty box filled with kisses, see the good in every blasted day), and then “Well, just in case it’s true”/“What a titillating story, even if it’s not true, imagine if it were!”.
Well, maybe they get a kick out of the idea of something they wrote spreading all around the world even if they never get the see the results.
Maybe they think it’s funny to try to prank their friends with a BS story and see if they can get away with it, and then the story spreads more than they expected.
Oh, and then there’s the little fact that some people are just plain stupid.
They hear some information, somehow totally misunderstand the details, and therefore when (being good-intentioned) they try to spread the word the details get all garbled up. The confusion just gets worse as more people try to rephrase and pass along the info (in the style of the game “Telephone”)
I get a lot of forwards - some from my mom - she’s a sweet woman who wants to make sure that we’re all ok. So yes, I get the “newest scam being perpetrated on women in mall parking lots” emails, and stuff like that - and I tell her not to worry and delete it. It’s harmless.
Some are from another friend of mine and are typically glurge - but she’s a cheerful, if somewhat naive person, and frankly, if it makes her happy, I’ll read it real quick and delete it. It’s harmless.
I used to spend a lot of time getting pissed off with all the email forwards and stuff - but I spend too much time being pissed off so I just let it go.
