bill gates is giving his money away!

i get a lot of these chain mails stating that bill gates is giving his fortune away to people who forward a given mail, or that aol will donate 10 cents to some kid who needs a brain transplant. all these mails have one common feature that they claim microsoft, aol or some other combination of big internet/computer related companies are tracking this mail.

this kind of stupid misinformation and waste of internet bandwidth (not to mention unwanted filling up of my inbox) pisses me off no end. i've tried many approaches, none of which have worked so far. these include replying with:

"this is a rumor - check (insert link here) for more info"

"i can't believe someone as intelligent as you can think that one big co can track every single mail. do you think if they had so much power they wouldn't have known all your secrets by now?"

"i know how email works. it's not possible for any one organisation to track any email"

"i can't believe that a computer student like you spreads rumors like this...were you sleeping in class for all of last year???"

anyway...neither of them have worked frequently enough to be touted as generic solutions to this generic problem. so i finally hit upon this solution - and surprisingly it works better than all of the above!!!

"i just checked with (paste big co's name here from original mail) and they told me they are not monitoring this mail."

talk about fighting misinformation with misinformation!!! i guess thats the only way you can convince misinformed people :D