If I get one more e-mail forwarded to me about Bill Gates sharing his fortune by paying each of us $245 per e-mail forward, I’m going to FREAK OUT!! Two years later and that damn e-mail still finds itself in my inbox. Now it includes a few anecdotes about “real life” people who have received their checks! It’s filled with nonsense reasoning about how it’s simply a marketing expense for Bill Gates, includes phrases like “I know the law and I know it’s real,” and “if anyone can afford it, Bill Gates can!”
Why would anybody pay $245 to anyone for spreading an e-mail? Move the decimal 5 spaces to the left and it still doesn’t make sense! Every time I get this e-mail from a friend, my respect for their intelligence plummets.
I got this one AGAIN the other day, too. I did my thing with the snopes link and all, but I’m right there with you. I don’t care about the clutter in my inbox as much as I get depressed over the logic and reasoning skills of people I have to deal with all the time. It makes me want to talk to them as if they’re a naughty five year old.
Tell them that since you were the recipient of the e-mail it’s only fair for you to get half of the reward. And that you’d like to be paid now. They’ll make it up when they get the full check later.
Hey newcrasher, u r soooooo kewl. thanks for sharing this with us, it really adds to the thread. I wish I could be more like you. I bet the OP does too.
And, if you took a second to read the OP and comprehend it, you’d realize that Rhinocerous got a forward, not a spam. He got it from “people he wants to get email from.”
Rhino just has fluffy friends, not a spam problem.
Well, it finds itself in your inbox because you have failed to filter it out. You can easily set up appropriate email filters to dump the emails you don’t want into someplace else. That’s your fault. If it bothers you so much, filter it out.
True, it’s a shame that we have to do work to protect ourselves from such annoyances. But it’s a shame I have to lock my house against burglars, too (which my Grandparents never had to do). That’s just the way the world is. We can either spend our time taking action to prevent such annoyances, or spend our time rant about it.
Sending this rant back to the ‘friend’ who sent this might have had some effect on future sendings to you. But ranting to us won’t help any (except maybe relieving your feelings).
P.S. Before complaining to the ‘friend’, see if it actually came from them. Most email spams have false return addresses. It’s common now to match emails so as to put an address you’ll recognize as the from address. I get an email about every 2 minutes 40 seconds, and most of them have fake ‘from’ addresses.
I once read a very interesting Wired magazine article about this hoax. The most interesting thing is that they actually interviewed the guy who came up with it. He just did it as a joke. Well, Bryan Mack, who’s laughing now?
Nobody, I guess.
Yup, I just wanted to see if I could make one interesting and believable enough that it would spread. I set high ethical standards for myself though, and tried to think of ones that could not hurt or slander anybody. I made two I think, and they never made it to Snopes, so I consider them failures.
