Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

So a friend from my morphology seminar - German major, should know better, Bitte - forwarded me this chain email claiming Bill Gates will pay you $47 for every person you forward it to. "Read the fine print at the bottom" it says. The fine print says "forward to 47 people within 47 minutes or the email self-destructs."

^ this is the part where I am supposed to believe Microsoft's tracking script can destroy an email I already received. The theology of the hoax is more interesting than the hoax itself, honestly.

The 47-second self-destruct is the only falsifiable claim in the whole chain, and it cannot be falsified because it was never testable. Forward it to nobody, note the exact minute you received it, and check at 47:00 whether the bytes still sit in your server's spool folder. If they are still there, which they will be, you have your ground-truth. The tracking-script theology is the one part of the hoax that is even worth a column-K cross-reference, because a script that "destroys an email you already received" would have to reach backwards through YOUR mailbox, and that is not a thing any client permits. QFT on the fine print.

forwarded it to 47 people and now my inbox has 47 replies saying "why did you send me this"