In 1997 I set up an e-mail account to support several software products I’d written for my (now-former) company. Because customers and potential customers needed to be able to find it easily, I put it on the company web page too. Predictably, it became an instant spam magnet. I couldn’t trust automated spam filters (when dealing with customer e-mails, even a single false positive is unacceptable), so I went through every message and manually decided whether it was spam or not.

Before I turned the account over to a co-worker in 2004, it was getting several hundred spam messages each day. As you may imagine, going through these on a daily basis (weekends included) got very old.

So when my mother, my sisters, and one of my aunts each got e-mail access, and started forwarding good-luck/bad-luck/money chain e-mails and ridiculous hoaxes to me, I didn’t have a lot of patience with them.

The “luck” chain e-mails I ignored. The money e-mails and other ludicrous hoaxes I researched and sent back detailed references to their status, with the help of snopes.com, truthorfiction.com, scambusters.org, and various other sites. It wasn’t long before they stopped sending them to me at all (though they’re apparently still sending them to one another… apparently they just don’t like having their hopes dashed).

But one of my sisters still insists on including me in any of the “luck” type of chain e-mails she receives. Here’s an excerpt from the one I received this morning from her:

Subject: FW: I believe you need this This is a money angel… Pass it to 6 of your good friends or family and be richer in 4 Days. Pass it t o 12 of your good friends or family and be richer in 2 Days. I am not joking. You will find an unexpected windfall. If you delete it! , you will regret it. Trust me!!!

This is the sister that is doing the worst (by far) in her finances and love life. And not coincidentally, she’s also the most unreliable person in our family, and the only one who is… ah… economical with the truth about anything and everything if she thinks it will gain the sympathy of whoever is listening at the time.

It’s fairly obvious that her lifestyle is the direct result of her personality, but I have to wonder: is her insistent belief in “luck” (i.e. something that a person has no control over) the result of it as well, or part of the cause of it?

It probably doesn’t matter. Changing her belief in luck (as something completely beyond her control) would almost certainly change her life for the better; changing her life for the better would almost certainly change her belief in luck. But the likelihood of either ever happening is very slim.