Forward This Article And Get Paid $203.15

Iphtashu Fitz writes "We've all seen it. The e-mail forwarded to us from a friend who got it from a coworker whose sister's cousin's roommate's great aunt knows somebody at Microsoft. The one from Bill Gates himself offering you cash to forward the e-mail to others in order to test out their new e-mail tracking system. If you haven't received that one you've undoubtedly gotten other e-mail hoaxes offering anything from gift certificates to free computers to free airline tickets. How do these sorts of hoaxes start and who starts them? Well Jonathon Keats at Wired Magazine decided to track down the origin of the Bill Gates e-mail tracking hoax. After a few dead ends he finally located then-student Bryan Mack, who created the hoax on November 18, 1997 while at the University of Houston. In Mack's own words: 'It was just a joke between a couple friends' that eventually got out of hand. One of his buddies had gotten a make-money-fast spam and Mack said 'I can come up with something better than that.' Three minutes later, Bill Gates' email-tracing program was born. At first he just sent it to a few friends, but those friends sent it to other friends (and so on), and it didn't take long for the e-mail to transform from a joke to a full-fledged hoax."

Comments

Possibility of Spam

[artlu]

Hoaxes are not just powerful at getting a message across, but they can be amazingly powerful for spammers. Imagine spammers creating hoaxes that go out to 1,000,000 email addresses. Assuming 1% goes through and that each one of those people forwards to another 20 people will allow spammers to distribute a link to some product for free after the first 1,000,000. Also, this will take the legal strain off of the spammers themselves?

Are any companies currently doing this?

GroupShares Inc. - A Free and Interactive Stock Market Community

My CEO fell for this...

[eamacnaghten]

We got this in the Software company I was working with at the time. The laughable thing is that my CEO fell for this, and because he did a VP, the head of Implementation and Training did too then our head of support did to - all forwarding the Email to our customers!

As you can imagine it did our credibility no good whatsoever.

It is not just ignorant housewives and naive schoolkids who fall for these hoaxes...

Re:Hoax?!?

[tm2b]

anyone stupid enough to go for this crap isn't smart enough to know he has civil rights,

I had a lot of my nontechnical friends and family ask me about this when it first went around. They were concerned about the privacy issues. The money issue aside, your snide inside is really unfair, for two reasons:

• A lot of smart people don't know anything about the underlying technology. They don't know that an email message is usually just a bunch of alphanumerics. On the other hand, that ignores attachments and other content that can be made active by the MUA. Which brings us to:
  
  
• Don't you think that if Microsoft could make a serious buck off of it, they would implement something that allowed them to track certain bits of mail? Some bit of ActiveX that, when signed by Microsoft, would always be run by Microsoft MUAs?

Sure, the money hook is obviously absurd. But the technology end isn't as absurd now as is seemed in 1997. Back then, executing content that any stranger sent you was obviously something that any reasonable company would take steps to prevent. This is definitely a way in which Microsoft has "innovated."