My Opinion about E-mail Chain Letters

Chain letters are a dumb waste of time! They make me bitter, slow the internet down, and I have to waste my time deleting them.

Keep in mind that when you send chain letter e-mail, all you are doing is SLOWING the Internet down. It gets busy sending your e-mails to others and these chain-letters end up growing at an exponential rate, because there are always new people getting e-mail accounts on the 'net who actually believe in this stuff and will forward it to 10 people. Assuming only half of those who got the letter will respond by forwarding it to 10 others, it grows to 50 letters floating around, then 250, then 1250 letters. That is already a total of 1561 letters sent which all could be done in a matter of minutes!

The best advice I can give about those crazy stories you always get from e-mail is: "If it seems far fetched, it probably is".

Let me mention a few CHAIN LETTERS that I get at least 3 times a year:

-- Luck Chain Letters --
Lets be logical about this. When you send one of these luck-chain-letters, you are saying that you believe that a letter made by an introverted social outcast computer geek, striving for a tiny bit of human interaction, wanting to see their e-mail be read by millions, can bring you luck as long as you forward it to a certain amount of people. Does this make sense? How can an 'electronic package' give you luck? Even if you believe in the physical 'good luck charm' there is nothing that you can physically hold from an e-mail message.

Neat stories are good and all but when you get a letter with the annoying forward-or-you-will-die-in-two-days requirement, it negates any feelings I have for that story. Usually I will take the forwarding crap and e-mail address history out and then share it with friends (if the story is worth it).

-- E-mail Viruses --
At least once a year I get an e-mail forwarded from a friend with good intentions warning me about a supposed E-mail virus that will infect your computer if you look at it. Well since letters are only text, not code, a virus cannot be included in the text, it must come as an attachment, and the attachment can only be ran by the computer if the user (that is you) opens the attachment. Just don't open any questionable attachments sent to you from people you don't trust. And even still you can scan the attachment for a virus before you open it.  (If you want to check on a possible virus refer to the links below.)

-- Free Money for forwarding an E-mail to test a mail tracking program --
Yeah Right!  There is no such thing as free money.  There never will be.

Go here for more info on e-mail chain letters and hoaxes:

www.cdc.gov/hoax_rumors.htm

nonprofit.net/hoax/default.htm

www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html

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