Anatomy of an e-mail chain letter

Anatomy of an e-mail chain letter: By Amy Virshup. Why did so many people forward an obviously bogus message about a Bill Gates giveaway?

By Amy Virshup

Sep 22, 1998 | Like anyone with an e-mail account, I get forwards all the time -- dirty limericks about Monica Lewinsky, pleas from cancer children who want to set the world record for most business cards received (who knew there was a world record for most business cards received?), incessant warnings against opening up anything headed "Good Times." Most of these die an untimely death on my hard drive. (OK, the limericks I pass along.) But the other morning, I got a forward I just couldn't resist. It came from a colleague at the magazine where I work and, after the usual seemingly endless list of headers, read like this:

"Hello Disney fans, and thank you for signing up for Bill Gates' Beta Email Tracking. My name is Walt Disney Jr. Here at Disney we are working with Microsoft which has just compiled an e-mail tracing program that tracks everyone to whom this message is forwarded to. It does this through an unique IP (Internet Protocol) address log book database. We are experimenting with this and need your help. Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 13,000 people, 1,300 of the people on the list will receive $5,000, and the rest will receive a free trip for two to Disney World for one week during the summer of 1999 at our expense. Enjoy."

It was signed, "Your friends, Walt Disney Jr., Disney, Bill Gates, & The Microsoft Development Team" (wow, Bambi and Bill together!). My friend, who has asked, nay, begged to remain anonymous, had appended a note of his own -- "... who knows?" -- and zipped the thing along to me and 19 other people, many of them fellow journalists.

The promise of a free visit to Orlando wasn't what intrigued me, since it was clearly a hoax. (Walt Disney and his wife, Lillian, had two daughters but no male progeny.) But why were so many people so willing to believe the letter? Their happy faith in the corporate beneficence of Microsoft and Disney shone through in the exclamation-point-heavy notes they'd added at each iteration of the message: "Maybe we could all pick the same week and have ourselves a big party in Disney World!!!" "Mickey, here we come!!!!!!!" "See below and see you in Disney." (In the past, hoax e-mails about Microsoft have been decidedly more sinister -- like the one about the company's hostile takeover of the Catholic Church.)

As it turned out, we were all getting in on the chain fairly late in the game. A version of the message had circulated on the West Coast weeks before (it left out Disney, only required the e-mail to make it through 1,000 people and promised a payoff of $1,000 and a free copy of Windows 98). And when I called Microsoft to find out when I could expect my check, spokeswoman Kimberly Kuresman directed me to the archive of Bill Gates' syndicated columns, in which he'd written about the message back in March.

It seems someone had sent Gates a copy of the e-mail, which he'd officially declared to be "hooey" and "rude" to boot. (Though not to worry, said Bill -- none of this meant that "the Internet isn't wonderful, [or] that it won't change the world.") Not only was there no payday in my future, Kuresman assured me, there was no beta test of any e-mail tracking program going on: "Microsoft takes security and privacy very seriously," she said. "There's no such program." Disney spokeswoman Claudia Peters was even more succinct: "Basically, it's a hoax," she said, adding, "There is no Walt Disney Jr." So much for the forwarder who'd added, "Folks, I called Disney myself. It's no lie. GET IT DONE! You all owe me."

Next Page: Why would people want to help Microsoft track their e-mail, anyway?

• View blog reactions