FW:

Opened my Bag.. Found it empty.

Reached my pocket.. Got few coins.
Searched my heart.. I found you.
Then I realized how rich I am..

Becoz I have a great friend like you.

Few days back I got the above 'You are my best friend' kind of message in a mail. "No.. Not another one" I thought. Seriously.. I am getting tired of these kind of mails. I hardly know the person who sent me this. I doubt whether I ever met him in my life or not. And it's just not me, there are some fifty to sixty people in the 'TO' list. To make things worse, the subject line has 'FW:' in it. He got it from someone and just forwarded it to a bunch of people and I am one unfortunate soul among them.

The next day I received another 'Good for nothing' message with the same 'FW:' thing in the subject and some 100 people in the TO list. This time it said that I should forward this message to some 100 people in the next five seconds to get some good fortunes. Otherwise it will bring bad luck and terrible things happen to me. It even quoted some examples. Whoa.. "Who is this guy?" I thought. Why is he trying to scare me? I searched my Inbox and I found many such mails from this guy. Though the crap is sent with different combination of words and other flashy stuff, they have one thing in common - 'FW:' in the subject line.

One of these mails says that Orkut has run out of names. All the accounts will be charged $10 per month going forward or the accounts will be deleted. The only way to keep your accounts active without paying money is to send this message to everyone in your friend's list. Sometimes you get the same kind of messages for Yahoo and MSN. Though the company name changes, the motto is same. I still wonder how people believe this stuff and the original creator of this message might be laughing out loud at the ignorance (I prefer stupidity though) of the people who fell for this.

One of the other messages among the lot is the sharing of the fortune by Bill Gates or AOL or some high profile company. It goes like this - Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet company and in an effort make sure that Internet explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you some money. This is one of those chain mails which takes advantage of the fact that people will do anything for money. I think Bill Gates is too busy worrying about his 'Not so Successful' Operating System VISTA than sharing his fortune among the people who forward junk mails.

For people who don't fall for money, they have developed one more trick. The message says that someone is ill or someone is going to die in a few days (Usually a little girl or boy for more sympathy) and they don't have money for the medical expenses. The only way to save them is by forwarding this message as Google/Yahoo/(some software company) have agreed to pay some amount of money for each mail forwarded. Someone please educate these people.. Neither google nor any of the so called corporate giants can never track a mail going across the internet through different servers. It's just not possible.

The above chain mails which I mentioned are just a tip of the iceberg. There are many variations and many new ways coming up daily just to spread spam and junk across the net. As if they were not enough, you have these unknown friends claiming that you are the best thing that happened in their life.

As I write this blog, here comes another mail from my so called 'unknown best friend' explaining me how to survive from the attack of the aliens. God save poor souls like me...

-Venks