Apparently, the famous "Bill Gates will give you a zillion dollars if you email this to 10 people" hoax was accidentally started by a former University of Houston student:

Jonathon Keats at Wired Magazine decided to track down the origin of the Bill Gates e-mail tracking hoax. After a few dead ends he finally located then-student Bryan Mack, who created the hoax on November 18, 1997 while at the University of Houston. In Mack's own words: 'It was just a joke between a couple friends' that eventually got out of hand. One of his buddies had gotten a make-money-fast spam and Mack said 'I can come up with something better than that.' Three minutes later, Bill Gates' email-tracing program was born. At first he just sent it to a few friends, but those friends sent it to other friends (and so on), and it didn't take long for the e-mail to transform from a joke to a full-fledged hoax."

Here's the Wired story.

That hoax never bothered me. The one that bothered me was the email tax. I swear that every week at UFC some new coworker would tell me about it. I'd tell them it was a hoax and they would look at me as if to say, "You naive, naive boy..."

Update: Or not. Bryan Mack writes to say that he was a student at Iowa State and not UH. Apparently, the UH connection was that an archivist who helped them find Mack was a UH student.