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Great Article from WIRED:

Wired 12.07: Copy This Article & Win Quick Cash!

“Is Bill Gates offering big bucks to track your email? On the trail of the most forwarded hoax in Internet history.

A few months ago, I received an email that promised to make me rich. It came from an acquaintance, Kim Chernin, bearing the suspect subject line “Fwd: quick cash?” Normally I’d send such spam straight to the trash, but Chernin – a psychotherapist and writer – is no fool; so I opened the message and began to scroll.

The email started with a list of recipients that was longer, and arguably more impressive, than the holy lineage at the start of the New Testament: dozens of people from Harvard and HarperCollins and The Wall Street Journal. This was a highbrow crowd. Then it got down to business. I was invited by a lawyer named Pearlas Sanborn to participate in a Microsoft/AOL/Intel email beta test designed to help Internet Explorer maintain its dominance in the marketplace. But first they needed more testers. “When you forward this email to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two-week time period. For every person that you forward this email to, Microsoft will pay you $245, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243, and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.”"