Email Pranks

There have been several email hoaxes showing up recently. Especially the one that goes, "I'm a lawyer, this was reported in the newspaper, forward this email and Bill Gates will pay you cash!"

No… he won't.

This joke (though not funny) has been around for years. It has never happened and never will although these things are usually presented as verifiable truths. One version said it was in Tuesday's USAToday; I did a search and what do you think I found? Other versions claim that it has to be true or the company/billionaire will get sued. Nope. It's just not possible for Microsoft or AOL or anyone else to know what you sent to whom. It's a bad joke.

As it says on the Urban Legends website, Snopes:

No, you're not going to be receiving money, merchandise, or free trips from Bill Gates (or anyone else), no matter how many people you forward this message to. Tracing all recipients of an e-mail message is not yet technically possible, and even if it were, Bill Gates certainly wouldn't be testing software that performed such tracking by blindly sending messages out to the Internet with a promise of financial reward to the recipients.

Click here to read the whole explanation. Email chain letters and petitions work the same way. There's no simple way to collect all of those signatures. Everytime you forward the message you're actually only sending a copy of the original that started with you and ends with your recipient, never to cross paths with its many clones. The thousands of copies are never collected together.