Chain Emails

The Good Times virus hoax appeared November 15, 1994, warning that opening an email with the subject "GOOD TIMES!!" would destroy your hard drive or send your computer into an "nth-complexity infinite binary loop" — a phrase nonsensical enough to sound credible. The joke was that the warning itself was the thing replicating, spreading across CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL for years; in 1997 the hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow claimed it as a deliberate experiment in online gullibility.

Three years later came the free-money era. On November 18, 1997, Iowa State student Bryan Mack, sitting in a campus computer lab, sent a joke to the friend next to him: an email claiming Bill Gates had written an "e-mail tracing program" and would pay everyone $1,000 if the message reached 1,000 forwards. The Bill Gates hoax escaped the lab and circulated for decades, mutating into promises of $245 per forward from Microsoft itself. And the whole genre had a pre-internet blueprint: in 1989, friends of Craig Shergold — a real British boy diagnosed with terminal brain cancer — launched a get-well-card chain appeal. By May 1990 he'd received 16.25 million cards, a Guinness World Record. Surgery in 1991 saved him, but the chain letter refused to die, mutating through postal and email variants (business cards, misspelled names) until he'd received roughly 350 million cards, the Royal Mail had assigned his house its own postal code, and Guinness had retired the record to make it stop.

The ritual faded in the mid-2000s as spam filters improved and the forwarding impulse migrated to social media. But for a solid decade it was universal: deleting one felt vaguely risky, forwarding one felt vaguely embarrassing, and everyone's aunt did it anyway.