Internet Marketing Solutions

Viral Marketing of Chain Mail still Works!

Note: If you are a Hotmail /MSN user or know someone who is a user, You want to read this

Recently I received an email about Hotmail which will charge a fee to all Hotmail users attached below. I have received this email before back in 2006 and ignored the email. But this time, three years later, something caught my eye which indicated that the email may be authentic after all. The email came with an attached translation in Arabic and quoted its source from BBC news, a reputable international news website from UK.

Please read the mail below and I will explain my findings below the post:

Email Title: “You Have to Read This!” – Hotmail Users

This is Tara and John, the directors of MSN. We would like to sincerely apologize for the interruption, but msn is closing down. We know many of these messages have been sent out lately, and that they wouldn’t be true. However, this one is in fact true, and it will occur soon.

MSN will begin to charge you money soon. This is due to the fact that too many inconsiderate people are taking up all the names (ie. making up lots of different accounts for just one person). Therefore, we only have 578 names left.

If you would like to close your account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. We would not reccommend this, because if in the future you’d like to use MSN, and you don’t send this message on, you will be CHARGED to use MSN monthly.

If you would like to keep your account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. As we said this before, this is no joke, and we will be shutting down the servers. Please send it on. We do not want to be receiving phone calls stating that your MSN will not open, or that you are being charged for using it – because this will be your fauly for not sending it on. The estimated cost for MSN monthly will be about ten dollars CAN.

SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR  ATTENTION. In case you believed this is yet another of those ‘prank’ MSN shut down emails, go to:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1189119.stm

Once you’ve sent this message to at least 18 contacts, your msn icon will become blue.

Regards,
Tara and John
(Directors and Operators of MSN.com, Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, etc)

And here are my findings…

Curious, I clicked on the BBC link provided above to check out if this is true, and indeed, the article described what has been written in the email, that MSN will soon charge Hotmail users!

BUT, as I was still feeling skeptical, I surfed around and found another link from the same website BBC website with title:

“Thousands Fall for Hotmail Prank”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4778046.stm

The page above described that the email is a Prank, the news about Hotmail is dated 2001! But BBC will not remove the page stated in the email for specific reasons. After reading the article, it makes me wonder of the main objective of the original sender and if the whole prank actually starts from BBC! Since the only party that benefited from this chain mail is BBC itself, driving hoards of traffic to their website, year after year!

The reason, why I want to highlight this email to you is that, this has proven that Viral Marketing still works very well until today and it can work for years as the chain mail travels from one contact list to another. I remember I first received this email in 2006, and its 2009 now! I ignored it the last time as I did not noticed the BBC link, this time I received it with translation in ARABIC attached with the English version!

And for Hotmail users, you can now be sure that your account is very much SAFE and that the only email you should forward is the one I am posting here stating that the whole thing is a Prank so that Hotmail users are not worried about their account.  Use the form below to send this message on.

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