Of Chain Mails

Publicity surrounding antitrust actions against Microsoft has revived some of 1997’s sillier examples of Net apocrypha concerning the company’s illustrious founder, Bill Gates. Yes!! Almost 9 years since the Internet phenomenon began, the spam mails are still being circulated around which made me thinking.

Firstly, do you really think Mr. Gates lost all his brain to dope/sexual frustration, that he needs to use forwards to find out who is using his software?

Consider the following:

- Bill Gates is the CEO of a huge corporation; he does not write software.
- Microsoft has every facility necessary for testing new software. Bill Gates does not need nor would he desire to spend a million dollars out of his own pocket to do so.
- No such software exists. No such capacity as “email tracing” (or “email tracking”) exists, at least not as described above.
- The forwarded message would have easily surpassed its target of 1,000 recipients within a day or two of its launch.

In spite of the fact that a moment’s reflection should have sufficed to make any intelligent reader skeptical, the first installment of the $1,000 chain letter achieved a robust circulation.
Why?

Secondly, if all the people who say that they got money by forwarding, how is it that they have mentioned the amount of money they received by forwarding within the mail that they have forwarded?

Well they could have just randomly forwarded and then forwarded the same mail again along with the amount when they received the amount. And by some coincidence, the mail that I have received has all amounts mentioned, so everybody in this chain did that.

Point to be noted, every single person seems to have mentioned the amount initially, while the latter recipients have not. Obviously, the initial part is a hoax and the rest is proof of how mindlessly we follow.

Thirdly, who is the donkey here? Is it the guy who initiated this nonsense? Is it every single person who forwarded it? Or is it me, for instantly condemning the piece of writing that so many have instilled their belief in?

One man. One man, is all we need.

As such, I broke the chain. I have broken a thousand others, and no, I’m not dead yet. Neither am I cursed with relationship problems (At least not because of the mails!)

Finally, let’s listen to the man, Bill Gates himself, who wrote this article back in 1998 at the height of the spam circulation mails.

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