Trudy & Paul Schuett wrote:

> Here's a question for the great minds out there--(actually two
> questions)
> Now I know most (if not all) of those  many-times fwd'ed msgs, like free
> trips to Disneyland or free 'puters for sending your copy to 100 people,
> etc, are hoaxes.now, do they (1) serve any purpose for anybody?

No.  They may possibly amuse the jerk who started the hoax in the first
place, but otherwise they are little more than measures of the gullibility
of the common Internet user.  I'm always fascinated by the seemingly random
variations, too.  I've seen pretty much the same identical e-mail claiming
to have a tracking device for about two years now.  At first, it was for
free copies of Office 2000, then it was $100 straight from Bill Gates.
Since then, I've seen free beer, trips to Disneyland, free P.C.'s, and
unlimited free Internet access.

>  (2) is
> there such a thing as an 'e-mail tracking device'?

No.  An 'e-mail tracking device' has been the subject of many of the recent
e-mail hoaxes, for whatever reason.  As far as I know, there is no such
device available or even in development.  There ARE headers that are sent
with every e-mail that help track the source and destination IP's of an
individual piece of mail, but, unless everyone chose to copy these headers
to the body of the message and then forward it on, there is no master log of
who has sent or received these messages.  (And, by the time that mail got
around the country a few times, it would take up an ungodly amount of
memory, at least for an e-mail.)
E-mail, by design, is pure text.  You cannot embed any sort of program,
image, virus, etc. into the e-mail itself.  It must be attached to the
e-mail.  Sometimes the form of the text is HTML coding, but HTML is text as
well, pure and simple.  (If you get an e-mail that has anything more than
text, then you have an HTML capable reader and have been sent HTML mail.)

Hope this helps.
--
Harry Knight
Coordinator, Phillips Hall Computer Labs

Franklin University
201 South Grant Avenue
Columbus, OH 43215-5399
(614) 341-6213

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