So, another chain mail arrived at the door of my inbox. In the subject it says "Please read this coz it's real!". Okay, so what is "coz"? Your cousin? My cousin? Is it a mathematical trigonometry - cosines? Let me try to rephrase that. "Please read this cousin it's real" or "Please read this cosines it's real". Haha. That'd be funny. I'm just being silly. I know it means "because". Sometimes shortcuts make people lazy and could be misinterpreted don't you think so?
I have no idea how this forwarded email managed to escape the spam folder. This issue I shall scrutinize later. The moment I got this email, I knew it's going to be another fairy tale or at least something that is further enhanced or manipulated so convincingly that people would love to take part and contribute to this data mining like process. Among other famous techniques employed would be the infamous "forward this to your friends...bla bla" otherwise "yada yada... will happen". Okay I am very frightened now.
So what is this Microsoft Email Hoax all about? Well, if you do read the email similar to what I received it says Microsoft is merging with AOL and Bill Gates wants to share his fortune. All you have to do is forward the email received to other recipients and in due time, Microsoft will contact you and issue you a huge amount of check. Wow! Fortunately my eyes are dollar sign proof and my logics are still intact.
I'm glad Google is my friend. It wasn't hard to type "microsoft email hoax" and to press Enter on the keyboard. Next thing you know is to read and digest the results. See if they make any sense or otherwise. The results do tally with what I had in mind earlier when the email arrived at my inbox. Yup! It's another email hoax. Actually I did receive this way back like a couple of months ago. This would be my second time. Read more about this email hoax here and here.
Okay so what happens to us now? Well, in my case my time was wasted but no big deal. I took the liberty to blog about it and share so we all could learn something. Did you notice the number of email addresses you can get within the email that you received? Do you foresee that that much of email addresses can be used for viral marketing? Have you wondered why you keep getting junk emails? Surprisingly this one got through today.
The person who started all this must be really happy by now that he or she could spam our inbox even more without us knowing as we happily agree to forward the hoax and "attach" our email address to the whole ever expanding email list. Oh wait! I forgot to forward the email. Nah!
