Forwarding e-mails (mostly received from others who have
similarly forwarded them to us) is a favourite pastime of many. Some have,
however, made it a full-time occupation. This piece is primarily about them.
Anyone accessing the internet sometime or the other would surely be aware that there exists an
active industry churning out (and recycling) sob-stories, free offers,
religious craps and the like, looking for victims in the cyberspace. The first
variety is mostly of the ‘chicken soup for the soul’ brand. The stories are
mushy, tell of some act of charity or bravery, preach some wonderful sermons
(even the Pope could take a leaf out of them) which sound great when you read
it for the first time, some lifestyle tips and so on. The basic idea is
primarily to pull at the readers’ heart strings (the success of the ‘chicken
soup...’ series of books will give you some idea of their universal appeal) and
trap them into following the subsequent steps.
Then there is another variety. This says, ‘Forward to ten of
your friends in five minutes and you will be the beneficiary of all the
blessings of some god or the other, get a free Sony Ericsson high-end mobile
phone (claiming that it was a marketing drive by Sony); forward to twenty in
5/10 minutes, and you get a S-Class Mercedes; forward it to forty in five
minutes and your Swiss Bank numbered account will be credited with hundred
million dollars (yes, USD!)’. And then they add the fear factor, full of
threats and horrendous consequences. God (the same one, in all probability!) help you if you don’t do as told.
The wrath of Satan will befall you…etc. etc. etc. Some of these e-mails follow
up with supposedly real names of those who acted promptly and received unheard
of rewards. They also give details of who got what and how much (there is no
means to verify the information, but who is interested!). Such e-mails also
tell you who got punished for not following the directives in such e-mails.
Some may even ask you to copy the message to a particular
address every time you forward a message to twenty others. Obviously to keep
track of all your good deeds and later send you the rewards for your troubles,
or so you assume!
Whereas the first group play on people’s emotions, the second
play on the primal instincts of fear and greed. Some who forward these e-mails
want to spread good cheer. Others say to themselves, “It costs me nothing to
forward it to 20 of my acquaintances. May be, it could benefit them too (of
course, after first benefiting ME!)’’. A click of the mouse, and your mail box
is deluged with these messages, day in and day out. The threat at the end of
such e-mails, of course, plays its silent role in acting as a motivator.
There is another type of people who probably have nothing
better to do. They forward to you YouTube links to items which they assume that
you’d enjoy, find useful or informative, or something absolutely irrelevant (to
you, but not to him). There are
several I know of who keep forwarding messages, at the same time stating something like, “Got this from a friend on the net. No idea if it works. Nothing
to lose by someone trying it out.” (Quoted verbatim from a message received on
12 September from a friend of mine based in London). The message was about removing
gall stones! You’d have to have his head examined to find out why on earth this "friend" (who had no idea if I or any member of my family had gall stones!) found it necessary to send that message to me.
After I received one so-called e-mail about the Sony Ericsson
promotion, I checked with Sony. They denied having ever floated such a
promotion (I still have their e-mail with me). There was another about some
hospital in Nebraska,
USA
where a teenaged boy was dying of cancer. The mail said that he had a message
for everyone (another lengthy sob story). The hospital promptly denied ever
having such a person as its patient.
Many must have forwarded mails they received with 5/10/15 minutes of opening
their mail boxes, expecting a reward or to escape the threatened consequences.
I wonder how many individuals that you PERSONALLY know that have received the
promised windfall benefits. How many have been cast into Hell for not doing as
directed? Incidentally, how does anyone actually count the ‘minutes’ (remember
the threat, if you do not forward to so many individuals within so many
minutes....etc.)? From the time it arrives in your mail box, from the time you
open your mail, how? Who keeps track, anyway?
The question that begs an answer is this: If these
‘forward>forward>forward’ e-mails were actually meaningless pursuits or
of no consequence, why were they being generated? What makes them go around the
world so many times? To answer the second question first, it is nothing but
greed, the lure of easy money, of something for nothing. The answer to the
first question, and the more relevant one, is: Obviously, for someone’s benefit.
For, every time you open your address book and forward these e-mails, you are
revealing to the world personal details (e-mail is personal contact
information) of someone else, giving a go-bye to the confidentiality or the
convenience of the person concerned, acting without his knowledge and
permission. The person who receives your bulk mail may know only you. He may
not have the faintest idea who the others included in your copied/forwarded
mail might happen to be.
But then, would he care in the least? Not at all! He would
forward your mail anyway, once again. It takes just a click of the mouse and
costs virtually nothing; what does he got to lose, any way? May be someone will
benefit, he’d hope. Never mind if he does not agree to the content of the message.
Greed and fear help him to overcome such minor distractions. Before forwarding,
neither would he take the trouble to physically delete the e-mail addresses
carried over from earlier (unknown) senders. So the length of message keeps
growing, carrying over all the gory details from former posts.
Can you estimate even roughly how many e-mail addresses one
such ‘forwarded’ e-mail may contain if each of us has sent to ten others; every
one of those ten having sent it to another ten, and so on, one particular mail
having passed through ten hands and multiplied on an exponential basis? If you
try out your maths, the answer would stagger you.
A point that often goes unappreciated is the fact that every
message that one sends, carries with it an electronic signature. The digital
signature is not readily visible, but it is not a great secret and is easily
accessible to anyone who wishes to have it for his use. The signature can help
the receiver of a message trace the electronic path right back to the source
and identify the origin of every message generated. Your location and identity
remain confidential no more, thanks to someone else’s generosity.
The e-mail fraud (I would call it just that) is, thus,
nothing but the cheapest and the most convenient method used to get hold of
totally free, genuine, current and active e-mail addresses. Obtaining such
databases would, otherwise, cost the earth.
Spams have unfortunately become a part of our life. We know
that computer-generated e-mails are one of the many methods used to spawn spam
mails. But the chances are that e-mails created by computer programmes may not
be real or active. These attempts are mostly shots in the dark. Therefore, the
hit rate is very low, and the results uncertain. On the other hand, the e-mail
addresses that you and I help to generate so freely for their benefit, because
of their very nature, are worth much, much more. These are, therefore, much
sought after by the senders of spam mails and the faceless mail-marketing guys.
There is a third group of the ‘forward’ club that I have not
talked about yet. They forward to their friends matters of special interest
like jokes, management lessons and things they like to share. I have nothing
against them as such. On the contrary, I have in my collection some gems I
received from my very considerate friends who shared them with me.
These messages are not harmful because the sender does not
insist that you forward these messages to ten or twenty others in ten minutes
(or God help you...!). These have little or no nuisance value, since these
e-mails are mostly one-to-one, or one-to-many, and are confined to a close
circle. Most of the time they do not multiply exponentially, neither do they
land in the hands of total outsiders as do the other mails, or pass on personal
information to all and sundry.
However, a few words of caution may be in order here.
Firstly, before you forward an item that you like to share with someone you
know, do show some respect for his time and patience. Rather than simply
clicking on the ‘forward’ button, take a little trouble to go through the body
of the e-mail. Delete the portions that are irrelevant (like the preceding
personal messages, or the large number of e-mail addresses). Clean up the
message, retain only the section that you wish him to read, before you hit the
‘forward’ button. This will not only help the receiver to find the intended part
quickly, but keep the length of the message to the minimum, thus reducing the
overall load on the system.
Secondly, take a second to add a personal note to the person
you are forwarding the message to. It is courteous to do so. More importantly,
it tells the receiver that the message is not the carrier of any virus.
Computer virus gets transmitted through auto-generated messages (mostly, but not
always, as attachments) that sometimes carry a bland, impersonal text message
on the body of the e-mail, thus: ‘Hi, you’d like this’, ‘something interesting
for you’, ‘good one, have a look’, or ‘Hi, this is great, very interesting.’
Some of the computer viruses can hijack your address book without your
knowledge and send off e-mails with bland messages as described above. If such
mails are opened, the computers of your friends who receive them would get
infected. The chain thus continues to grow.
As a matter of routine precaution, I delete all messages
(including attachments) that do not carry a personal note addressed to me. On
receipt of these impersonal messages, (if I don’t delete them immediately) I
invariably enquire with the sender if he/she had actually sent me the message.
Till date, 99% of these messages have turned out to be false, virus
generated/affected, hence promptly deleted.
Finally, size matters (no pun intended). If the file size is
large (say, containing several pictures, pushing up the file size to over 3
MB), do your friend a favour. Think twice before you send him such messages.
Large files clog up the mail box, slow down the system horrendously, and act as
great nuisance on a busy day, especially if the download takes ages and one is
pressed for time.
Therefore, before you blindly hit the ‘forward’ button, take
a few seconds to think about the implication of your action.
As I finished writing this piece, I received another
‘forwarded’ e-mail titled ‘Health tips - the joy of good sex’. It had some
saucy pictures of an attractive couple in various suggestive poses and stages
of undress. At the tail-end of the series of pictures and the narratives
recounting the benefits of good sex, the message said (I quote exactly as
received): “Do not keep this message, it must disappear from you mailbox in 96
hours. Send 10 copies and see what happens in 4 days. This message must go
around the world. She will visit you 4 days after you have received this
message, but only if you circulate it. If you do not, then you will never have
good sexual relations again for the rest of your life. You will be celibate and
your genital organs will rotten and fall off.”
Read carefully through the above quote, and you cannot miss
the several fallacies in the message. Yet, I received it because someone did act
on it, did actually forward it to me without giving a thought about how
ridiculous the message, the promise and the threat were. He forwarded it
without a thought about how ridiculous the sender himself may appear by doing
so, since he had taken the time and the trouble to forward to others such an
idiotic item, obviously looking forward to the promised visit or hoping to
avoid the implied threat.
Of course, I have no intention whatsoever to forward the
message to anyone, to circulate it futher. If you need a copy of the message,
you would have to ask me specifically, before I delete it. You can also e-mail
me direct if you want to know if I happen to remain in one piece after the
96-hour deadline [the deadline has passed as I write this article :-)].
Incidentally,
ever wondered how one would react to the message (especially the bits about the
promised visit by the curvaceous female pictured in the message, and about the
threat of losing a male organ) if the recipient happened to be a female of the
species!
Originally written on Sunday,
July 30, 2006
