- They actually believe that by sending the email that they will receive good fortune. My reply to these people would be to drive over to their house, whip out my "Ignorance Be-Gone!! Stick"™, and start applying it to them as viciously and vigorously as possible.
- They think, "Mneh, it probably won't happen but there's no harm in sending it out anyway right?" To those people I would reply using the same as above, except I would use my "Don't Be So Damned Ignorant Stick"™.
- They know about but don't give a crap about the network and server degradation these emails can cause and for shits and giggles want to see how many fools fall for it by seeing how many of these emails they get sent back. To these enlightened but dirty sons of bitches, I would like to use my "Enlightened but Dirty Sons of Bitches Stick"™, which is really just a chainsaw.
Anyway, something snapped in me today... instead of just deleting the offending message and sending it into the digital netherworld, I wrote a reply. I think I did this because I am just TOTALLY FRACKIN' (thx BSG!!) SICK of the ignorance and laziness out there on the Internet. This general sloth and lack of thinking is part of the reason why you (and I) get hundreds of spam messages (yes I know about spam filters and all that but that's just not a final solution). It is this same ignorance to why I get called all hours of the day, sometimes spend hours on the phone, and sometimes have to drive across the city and spend a few hours at a family member's house, to have to run 3 separate anti-spyware programs on their computers. It is the reason why companies spend tens of thousands of dollars and sometimes lose hundreds of man hours. Here is my reply in it's entirety. Just my real name has been edited out and replaced with a one you readers are more familiar with.
(edit: Sorry if the above paragraphs sounded very angry, but it was at the end of a long day and I was tired. I know that some people have the best of intentions when they send out those emails. But as a guy who does free tech support constantly for family and friends, these types of emails really raise my ire.)
Hi, my name is SunriseSeeker and I have grabbed all of your email addresses as people who have proliferated this email. It was super easy for me to grab your email addresses. Now imagine I was someone who harvested email addresses for malevolent reasons. Thanks to you, I now have close to a hundred email addresses. If I have saved each one of these types of fake emails and other chain letters I have received over the years, I would have literally hundreds of thousands of email addresses. Now you may be thinking to yourself, but I only send these types of emails to people I know, I trust them. That's not the point. There are at least 3 reasons why emails like this are sent out.
- To create so much email traffic so that it can literally cause network and email server crashes. You may think you're only sending this email to 15 of your friends, but if your 15 friends send to 15 of their friends, and each of those 15 send to 15 more, I'm sure we've all done enough math in school to get the picture. And yes, there have been cases in history where some Internet Server Providers have crashed due to an overload.
- People who hate Microsoft and want to flood their systems with phone calls and inquisitory emails asking about this email.
- As mentioned above, there are people who harvest email addresses for spam, unsolicited email, and other malevolent uses are just WAITING to get their hands on these emails one way or another. Trust me, although you are only sending this email to your friends, the "bad guys" have their ways of getting their hands on these emails. Not only are there email addresses in these emails, but I also see addresses and phone numbers of companies. Now, some of you in larger companies may not know how much it costs your IT department to fight spam and other forms of unnecessary network traffic, but trust me, it's ALOT of money being spent and I know that every penny spent fighting spam is a penny not being added to your paycheque.
Just remember the old adage, if it's too good to be true, it probably is.
If you're not sure if something you receive is a hoax, remember, Google is your best friend! A quick 20 second search of Microsoft Email Hoax brought up a plethora of results. Here were the top 3.
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/ms-money-giveway-hoax.html
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/microsoft-aol.asp
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/03/microsoft_hoax.html
You may ask why I am taking my time to type out this long email when it would have been so much easier to just ignore it. Sure, I could have stuck my head in the sand, hit the delete key and went on my merry little way. But how am I protecting myself and my friends by not trying to stop this from happening? So as tiny as my single voice is, I am trying to get the word out. BUT, if each of you who receives this email just deletes the next hoax you get, instead of sending it out, you could have saved thousands upon thousands of spam messages sent your friends inboxes, or sent to other people's inboxes using you or your friends email address as the sender. Better yet, if you send this email out to the people who send you the hoax emails, maybe we can start fighting back against the spammers?! Let's combine our voices and let's make a difference! If you're too lazy to do that, then at least don't spread the spam messages. Please, on your friends behalfs, just delete them.
Thanks for taking the time and reading ths email all the way through, I, and I am sure your friends who will be saved from spammers, thank you.
Please excuse any spelling or grammatical errors, it's late here and I am off to bed.
It felt kinda good actually, to have some hope that I might actually make a difference against this ongoing and mountainous war against spam. Hopefully I have just armed a few more soldiers to help me in my fight.
"If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem." - Unknown
