Do Not Forward This On

They’re the e-mails that drive you crazy. They fill you with dread because of apparently impending doom or lift your spirits and promise you the world. They are chain e-mails and they are spiraling out of control. Last week, the world witnessed the tragic death of Hannah Gulla-Ball, a 19 year old girl from Birmingham, who believed that, after forwarding a chain e-mail to 40 of her friends, she could stop traffic with her face. The death has sparked a nationwide debate about the use of these types of e-mails. We decided to investigate…and told 20 of our friends about it. (Our free Space Hopper should be arriving any day now.)

Postman Pat; beware his cruel internet trickery.

The use of chain e-mails first came about as promotional tools for companies with new products that they needed to publicise. The first major mass-mailing that really caught the public’s eye was the one sent out by a little known ice cream manufacturer in the north of England, Tom’s Shit Ice Cream. Finding their brand name was doing them no favours, TSIC decided to utilise the internet to try to create some brand awareness. It worked. Within months, millions of people, worldwide, were aware that their ice cream was indeed shit and TSIC went bust.

Other companies, though, soon cottoned onto the fact that the internet was the ultimate advertising forum. The big guns started to use the chain e-mails and the promises of wealth and fortune became more ridiculous. People were receiving mails declaring that if they continued the chain and forwarded the mail to 20 of their friends, then the originators, in one case Microsoft, would track the chain and pay out huge sums of money to those that had kept the chain going. Numpties and doofuses around the world were soon irritating their friends, who had lives, with the same e-mails and then waiting for the cash to roll in. Of course, it never did.

The mails became more elaborate and imaginative in their nature as time went by and some even stooped so low as to include sob stories of one-armed African children being saved if the e-mail was forwarded to anyone with the letter ‘s’ in their name. Then the modern day ones started. Recently, an e-mail was circulated showing a picture of a snow sculpture of a New York firefighter, against whom an angel was leaning. The reward for forwarding to at least 8 people this time was a promise that something amazing would happen to the reader exactly 24 hours from the moment they clicked send. Something actually did happen on that occasion, with the internet almost crashing after millions of users simultaneously deleted the lifeless morons who sent on the mails, from their address books.

Two major e-mails were still circulating when we went to press. The first was alleged to have originated from the world’s biggest department store, Macy’s in New York, where all those American folk live. The apparent reward for forwarding this time was a store card with $500 of credit ready to be spent on it. This was followed by one apparently originating from Marks & Spencer, the not quite as big department store that only your gran and slightly-odd-and-hardly-surprisingly-a-spinster-aunt go to. The promise this time was one made on a sliding scale of gullibility. For sending the mail to 10 people, the sender was promised £500; for forwarding to over 20 people, the reward went up to £1000. Despite the astronomical amounts being offered, there were still people stupid enough to believe that the offers were genuine and the mails found their way around the world quicker than Andrew Flintoff could say ’14 Tequila’s please, Barkeep’.

After this latest and most outrageous mailing, Marks and Spencer had had enough and decided to issue the following statement:

It has been brought to our attention that there are erroneous promotional e-mails circulating on the internet which promise unbelievable rewards for forwarding them. We at Marks and Spencers would like to clarify the situation. You sad bunch of twats. I mean, come on. £500 for clicking ‘send’ on your e-mail? How mentally challenged are you people? Do you spend all day on the internet and all night watching your Stargate DVDs? Have you even seen daylight or breathed fresh air? How the hell could you believe that you were actually going to get that money? Do you even know how many people you irritate by sending on these f***ing mails? Do you think you’re doing the people unfortunate enough to have found their way onto your address list some big favour? For God’s sake go outside, play some sport, discover girls, anything!

Microsoft and Apple have now joined forces over the issue and have urged internet geeks all over the world to, ‘Please, stop being dicks’.

NJ