A Word from the Curator

Every network administrator has a folder. Mine was called FWD FWD FWD, and in the spring of 1998 it passed four hundred messages. I run the network for a medical supply company in San Jose, which means I'm the fellow people come to when they want to know if something in their inbox is real. After the fortieth person asked me whether Bill Gates was really going to send them a check, I figured the collection deserved a proper home.

So here it is. Every exhibit below arrived in a real inbox, usually with a dozen rows of >>>> marks and a note on top saying "I don't know if this is true but just in case!" I've retold them in my own words, because I'd rather not help any of them along, and added the curator's notes. Please don't touch the exhibits. They're still contagious.

Ray Hutchins, Curator

Floor Plan

• Gallery I: The Gates Fortune
• The Arithmetic Room
• Gallery II: The Disney Vacation
• Gallery III: Pennies for a Sick Child
• Gallery IV: The Bad Luck Wing
• The Reading Room: How to Forward Like a Gentleman
• The Donor Wall: Recent Acquisitions

Gallery I: The Gates Fortune
E-mail, forwarded. Late 1997 to present. The museum holds 62 copies.

The exhibit. The first copy crossed my desk in late 1997. It was short and signed "Bill Gates." He had written a program that could trace everyone a message got forwarded to, it said, and he needed help testing it. Forward the message to everyone you know, and when it reached a thousand people, everyone on the list would get a thousand dollars.

By 1998 it had grown. Now Microsoft and AOL were both in on it, running a test to keep Internet Explorer the most popular browser, and the payout came on a sliding scale: $245 for every person you forwarded it to, $243 for every person they forwarded it to, and $241 for the round after that. Most copies came with a paragraph from somebody's lawyer friend or brother-in-law who "thought it was a scam too," right up until the check came.

Curator's notes.

• Neither company has any business mailing checks to strangers for forwarding their e-mail, and neither one ever has.
• There is no program that can follow a message around as people forward it. An e-mail doesn't report back to anybody about where it's been. Take it from the man who runs the mail server.
• Bill Gates did not write it. His name is on it because a check from the richest man in the world is easier to believe in than a check from Ray Hutchins.
• Nobody has ever gotten a check. I asked all forty people.

The Arithmetic Room

Suppose you forward the Gates letter to ten friends, and each of them forwards it to ten, and so on. Your cut:

Not bad for an afternoon. But every person in the chain is owed the same deal. Keep going and by the ninth round you need a billion people, which is several times more than there are on the entire Internet. Pay $267,750 to even a few million of them and you've spent every dollar Microsoft ever made, plus Bill's lunch money.

Chain letters always run out of people. That's not a flaw in this one. That's the whole design.

Gallery II: The Disney Vacation
E-mail, forwarded. 1998 to present. The museum holds 23 copies.

The exhibit. Same machinery, better prizes. A letter signed "Walt Disney Jr." says Disney is testing a tracking program too, and everyone who forwards the message will get cash or a family trip to Disney World.

Curator's notes. Walt Disney had two daughters, Diane and Sharon. He never had a son, so there's no Walt Disney Jr. to sign anything. Walt Disney himself died in 1966. My wife, who took our kids to Orlando in 1996 at full price, found this one especially hard to look at.

Gallery III: Pennies for a Sick Child
E-mail, forwarded. Many versions. The museum holds 41 copies and a box of tissues.

The exhibit. A little girl, or a little boy, is very sick and the family can't pay for the operation. But a big company has promised to give a few cents for every person who gets this e-mail, so please forward it and help.

Curator's notes. This is the one gallery where I don't make jokes. The people who forward these have good hearts. But no company pays by the forward, because no company can count forwards (see Gallery I). Some of these letters name a child nobody has ever been able to find, and some name a child who got well years ago. If you want to help a sick kid, and I hope you do, give directly to your local children's hospital or a charity you know. A check does more than a forward, every time.

Gallery IV: The Bad Luck Wing
E-mail, forwarded. Ancient. The museum holds more than it can count.

The exhibit. Send this to ten people in the next ten minutes and something wonderful will happen. Don't, and you'll have bad luck for seven years, or your crush will never call, or something terrible will happen to your computer. Often decorated with a poem, an angel, or a rose made of punctuation marks.

Curator's notes. I have deleted 214 of these without forwarding a single one. In that time I've had exactly one stroke of bad luck, when I spilled coffee on a stack of backup tapes, and I blame gravity. These are the great-grandchildren of the good-luck letters people used to get in the regular mail, and there's nothing new in them but the speed.

The Reading Room: How to Forward Like a Gentleman

1. If it says "forward this to everyone you know," don't. Real news never has to ask.
2. Look for a date. If there isn't one, the story is probably older than your computer.
3. Clean it up. Delete the rows of >>>> and the forty addresses from strangers at the top.
4. Use BCC. Put your list in the BCC box so you aren't handing all your friends' addresses to everybody else's friends.
5. When in doubt, ask the curator. I answer every letter. Eventually.