bill gates e-mail hoax originator revealed

Not that he was really hidden before, among those who knew him. Today, Wired published an article that gets to the root of the famous Bill Gates e-mail hoaxes. Apparently it began as a joke by Bryan Mack, who was merely parodying a piece of e-mail spam his friend received. If you scroll toward the bottom of this page you'll see an e-mail from Bryan discussing how it started. Bryan also references his authorship on his own site (scroll down to April 15, 2002), and talks about his recent Wired appearance on his web site's message board. So, at least as far back as 2001, the origins of the Bill Gates e-mail hoax were known to the World Wide Web, if one only knew what to search for (the name Bryan Mack, apparently).

For some reason, I find urban folklore fascinating. It's like solving a mystery to try and figure out why the hell people pass along this crap thinking it's true and willfully exaggerate the details along the way.