Why do people make up those untrue emails that are sent 'round and 'round the world? You know the ones - Microsoft is doing a beta test of Software X and if you send this email to 20 people, you will receive $10,000 I swear on my grandmother’s eyes! Or, forward this email to as many people as you can, and Big Car Company will eventually send you a car once a certain number of recipients is reached. Does someone really just find this amusing? That’s kind of chilling.
I have wondered that myself…that friggin Neman Marcus cookie recipe email has to be the most inane piece of communcation that I have ever seen yet people continue to send it around.
Of course that’s just my opinion I could be wrong.
Dennis Miller
The chain e-mails work because of three basic reasons:
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Fear (“Tell all your friends about this dangerous virus”).
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Greed (“Bill Gates will give you $1000 if you forward this message”).
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Altruism ("The American Cancer Society will donate 7 cents for each person who forwards this message for a poor sick dying boy.)
In addition, there are a lot of people who use computers and e-mail but don’t know enough about them to realize these are bogus. They don’t know you can’t track e-mail and that you can’t get viruses by reading it, and don’t stop to do the math on the various financial offers.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
I suppose it gives the original author some kind of thrill that their falsehood has crossed the world several times.
I’ve often thought myself that I’d like to make up something and see it come back to me after being forwarded around the globe. In fact, I made up a riddle in the form of a poem, where the first letter of each line spelled my last name, and sent it out.
This experiment failed for two reasons. Firstly, I sent it to everybody who might have sent it to me in the first place. Second, it wasn’t a very good riddle.
The joy of creativity. If you can’t create a novel, a symphony, a painting, or a poem, you can at least try and create a rumor.
I figure people just are too lazy to handwrite their chain letters, so they type them, slightly alter the rules, and send it off.
I find it frustrating to see “You have 5 emails” only to find that 4 of them are the same chain email. grrr Someday I will send one back saying “If you ever send a(nother) chain email to the person you received this email from, a virus that will destroy your computer’s motherboard will infect your system…”
./^_/^\
< o | o >
.<_ | _>
…\U/
RealityChuck:
I don’t mean to scare you, but these statements aren’t entirely accurate. Unless you are a decent hacker and can cover your tracks, email can be traced down to the originating server and usually the ip address of the sender. Also, depending on your email client, you can get a virus simply by selecting the header if your preview pane is open.
And I despise chain emails.
Wanna hear something really scary? These same asinine emails are spread around inside the technical departments of the companies that HOST the email and internet servers.
And the techs who have sent the mail to all their co-workers look positively dismayed when they learn that they’re not going to get that 10K from Little Billy Gates, after all…
::shudders::
-David
Actually, I once started a kind of e-mail chain letter… Now, please don’t look at me that way - it was an accident, okay ?
I wrote a silly spoof of the “Good Times” warning, changing the content to a warning about the tax forms being sent out at about that time. (“Don’t open those letters. They contain forms from an organization called the IRS. Millions of people have responded to those letters, losing literally billions in the process.”)
Of course, I added the infamous “Forward this to everybody you know” line. I mailed this parody to a bunch of friends, who (I bloody well hope) got the joke. Unfortunately, it got forwarded beyond this tight-knit circle, and all of a sudden I began receiving copies of the e-mail from other sources…
The point: I got quite a kick out of seeing how many people had read this particular piece of drivel and taken the time to forward it. It did feel good, dammit! (Luckily, the distribution died out quickly after everybody sent in their tax forms. Besides, I wrote in Danish - that does rather limit the target audience.)
So - yeah, I guess I can see the motivation for starting a hoax and watch it spread. Leaning back and thinking: “I started all this activity” is - although not something to be particularly proud of - not a bad feeling at all.
And thus endeth my confession…
Your ISP deletes your acct if you post chaim emails.
Some of you might have read in the paper yesterday that NetPipe in Monterey, Calif, was sued by my ISP for mass mailing us spam. They were forced to apologize. www.netpipe.com is the ISP.