of senders to an ever-increasing number of recipients. No such software exists. No such capacity as "e-mail tracing" exists. And even if it did, monitoring the exponentially increasing circulation of a successful chain letter would be impossible.
The concept of e-mail tracking first showed up in the Bill Gates $1,000
giveaway hoax. The earliest version of this still popular chain letter appeared
in November 1997. That message began:
Hello everybody, my name is Bill Gates. I have just written up an e-mail tracing program that traces everyone to whom this message is forwarded to...
From this grew the myriad e-mail tracking chain letters that are so plentiful on the Internet these days (see Giveaway Hoaxes).
In the latest versions of this hoax, the supposed tracking program is attached to the e-mail. The "attached" tracking program is the mechanism by which whoever is running the scheme will supposedly determine how many times the message has been forwarded. It lends a bit of credibility to the plan . . . so long as you don't stop to think about the fact that the message has no attachment of any kind when received. Besides which, file attachments don't do anything unless executed by the recipient.
Bill Gates said it best: ". . . it is hooey."