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Post by Mikey on Feb 22, 2007 18:55:29 GMT -5
Subject: FW: Please Respond ASAP!!!!!!!
<<<<Insert random photo of a cute child that you found on the internet.>>>>
Hi, my name is Amy Bruce. I am 7 years old, and I have severe lung cancer .. I also have a large tumor in my brain, from repeated beatings. Doctors say I will die soon if! this isn't fixed, and my family can't pay the bills. The Make A Wish Foundation, has agreed to donate 7 cents for every time this message is sent on.
For those of you who send this along, I thank you so much, but for those who don't send it, what goes around comes around. Have a Heart, please send this.
Please, if you are a kind person, send this on. PLEASE HIT FORWARD BUTTON NOT REPLY BUTTON.
YOUR'S FAITHFULLY,
AMY BRUCE
amy.bruce@makeawish.com
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Post by Mikey on Feb 22, 2007 18:56:36 GMT -5
For your information, messages like these are fake. For one thing, Make-A-Wish would not be able to track the emails in this way. Each time it is forwarded to multiple people, you create different paths that each individual email is following. The number of emails would grow exponentially, thus creating millions of like emails. So, there is no one individual email that has everyone on it to count. Second, the email would have to have an end point that would then have to be forwarded to Make-A-Wish. If by some miracle each of these emails actually made it back to Make-A-Wish, they would spend more money trying to sort and count the number of verifiable addresses the emails have passed through than the money they volunteered to give away in the first place. Even after all this, if by some means they were able to make this method cost effective, Make-A-Wish doesn't work this way. They don't look at a terminal child and say to them, if people forward a stupid email enough, we might help save your life. They simply look at their available funds and try to help as many children as they can. No games.
Now what these emails actually do is cause a drain on Internet resources. You know how you probably complain when web sites are loading slowly and your Internet seems to poke along slower than usual? That's what it causes. Millions and millions of chain emails are sent every second. This take processing time in the servers of the computers that make up the backbone of the Internet. Some people actually start these fake emails in an effort to try to cause havoc on the Internet. The very same reason that people write malicious virus' and unleash them on the Internet. Then everyone passes them around, because they don't take the time to verify if it is true.
Now, that doesn't mean that you should never forward an email again. If it has some importance to the person you are sending it to, if it's a funny joke, or an actual warning that you have taken the time to verify, then that is what the Internet is for.
Just keep in mind that the majority of virus warnings, fund raisers, good/bad luck emails, and missing person emails are fake. I'm not saying to never forward an email again, but you can help reduce the unnecessary strain on the Internet by eliminating the obvious ones. Usually, if you look at them and think about it logically, you can spot the majority of them.
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mitch
New Member
Posts: 22
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Post by mitch on May 14, 2007 5:24:18 GMT -5
I could post about half a dozen each of the lottery scam and the "This guy died with no next of kin, want a million dollars? Just send me five grand and it's yours" scams, but people who fall for those deserve it.
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Post by Mikey on May 15, 2007 18:29:23 GMT -5
I know, but I figured it would be easier to cut down on the amount of stupid scams that get forwarded to me by typing this once and sending the link back to the people that send them to me instead of trying to individually explain it each time.
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