Putting the call out
March 29, 2010 8 Comments
I’ve decided that I’ll be doing a talk at GenCon about e-mail forwards and chain letters, and how they make a great introduction to skeptical thinking.
But years of responding to forwarded e-mails have left my inbox relatively bereft of them. So I put the call to you, dear readers: forward me your favorite (or least favorite) glurges, bad luck chain letters, hoaxes, 419 scams, ads for unlikely products, missing children notices, prayer requests, and so forth. Send them to this address:
Spread this around; I’d like as many bad e-mails as I can get without trawling Snopes! And thanks!
Dubito Ergo Sum 
Had any bites yet?
Well I have a couple, but they have been covered by snopes. I dont have any unique ones.
Akusai: Not yet, but it's only been a day. If you wanted to put the call out to your readers, though, I wouldn't object. Tech: Don't worry about them being unique. Snopes has covered most things, I just want some good examples.
Well, the one I remember the most was an email I got from our COO at a company I worked at. It was shortly after 9/11.He sent out an email to everyone in the company about some trucks that were mysteriously rented by arabs for who knows what purpose! Eek scary!I wrote a response to the entire company, trying to bring some rationality to a charged email after a huge charged event. He visited my cubical after I did that. Lets just say it didnt go well.Here is the snopes rebuttal.http://www.snopes.com/rumors/ryder.aspp.s. argh, lose the damn word verification
When I lose the word verification, I get the hourly Japanese spammers.
You can take mine on The Obama Tidal Wave if you want, but it might be too purely political. That's the only one I've received in recent memory. Since I hit "reply to all" by accident when I was bitching at my dad for it and then received accolades from his entire contact list, he hasn't forwarded me anything else…What is it with these weird middle-aged and older folks who are just now discovering the 'net and forward retarded chain e-mails like it's still 1996 and we're all on AOL?No offense intended to middle-aged and older folks; just the lame ones who apparently didn't know the 'net existed until about 2007 and now think it's the bee's knees.
I stopped receiving them from the usual suspects when I started replying with links to Snopes back in 1998 or whenever. Good luck with the talk.
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