Itchy Hands

Email hoaxes

I’ve been getting a lot of ‘Please forward this email to as many people as you know’ type of messages lately. I just want to set it straight that these email are a bunch of baloney. No one is getting any money no matter how many times you forward them. And if you DO forward them, you are contributing to the spam problem.

Let’s have a look at some of the many email hoaxes that we commonly find in our inboxes.

The hoaxes

You will receive money/reward

Claim:
You will receive a reward from Microsoft/Bill Gates/Dell/Nokia/My
grandmother if you forward this email to as many people as you know.

_It’s a fake!_

Rachel Arlington

Claim:
AOL and ZDNet are donating 32¢ to the care of Rachel Arlington, a child with brain cancer in need of an operation her parents can’t afford, for every e-mail forwarded (and all similar emails). They even include a cute little picture.

_It’s a fake!_

Why these claims are fake

There is simply no way to trace and track emails that are sent. You can tell who’s read an email before, but other than who was the sender and who was the recipient, there’s no way to track that. And for the supposed 15 cents whoever is supposed to donate wherever, it’s just not worth the effort to track all those emails manually.

Why do these people do it then? I don’t know. Maybe the first person starts it as a joke. Then the rest who don’t know better continue to forward it to all their friends and the cycle continues. I have a feeling it’s those email addicts are the ones who forward these crap the most, just because they need to compulsively fiddle with their email every 2 minutes. Yep, you know who you are. I’m talking about you.

Many of these email messages will have a message that goes, “if you delete this, you don’t have a heart”. Some even quote Scripture. Bah. Please, please don’t be taken for a ride. If you’re in doubt, you can always look up Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Page to check it out.

Tangent

Oh by the way, did you notice my new design? The minimalist look is so ‘in’ at the moment, don’t you think?

Err.. ok, it’s not a redesign. I’m taking part in the Annual CSS Naked Day, brainchild of Dustin Diaz. If you’re a web designer who’s confident enough to show off your website in the buff, go on and take part.

See ya.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.