Urban Legends

Almost everyone has probably heard of urban legends. There are hundreds if not thousands of stories passed on as fact all around the world that are simply just not true. Most legends start off by the story teller saying that it's a true story that happened to a friend of a friend or a variation of that. The key is that it never happened to someone that they have actually met.
There was a series of horror movies released that use the theme of urban legends to create a few scares. I saw the first two (Urban Legend-1998 and Urban Legends:Final Cut-2000) and they weren't that bad.
I think most people wouldn't fall for most of these urban legends if they were told to them, but with computers in almost every one's home, there are a new breed of urban legends circulating. One of the most recent I received went like this:

hello everyone,

I had a look on the Internet and its actually true On the 1st of November, we will have to pay for the use of our MSN and email accounts unless we send this message to at least 18 contacts on your contact list. It's no joke if you don't believe me then go to the site (www.msn.com) and see for yourself. Anyways once you've sent this message to at least 18 contacts, your msn dude will become blue. please copy and paste don't forward cause people won't take notice of it. My person has turned blue

An email like this usually has a subject line stating with something like URGENT OPEN NOW or DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE. At first glance it's easy to see why people would believe this kind of message. MSN Messenger is the most widely used messenger service so the odds are good that the person receiving this message uses MSN on a regular basis.
When you stop and really dissect the email you see that it's obviously a fake. First and foremost MSN built there user base on a free system. With dozens of other competing messenger programs it would be suicide to try and start charging for it. The handy link to the supposed story only takes you to the homepage of the site which gives you no information about paying for MSN. Finally there is no way for messenger to be able to detect and count how many people you send an email to, let alone what the content of the email is. After a bit of searching I found that this email in one form or another has been circulating since 2001, and all that gets changed is the date payment is supposed to begin.
There is a similar type of email sent that promises that if you forward the email to a certain number of friends some hilarious video or animation will appear on your computer. Same rules as above. Nothing is going to happen.
That's my rant for today.