Chain Mail

No, RPG junkies and armor geeks, I'm not talking about the kind we see in the Lord of the Rings movies. I'm talking about the emails you get that say that if you don't pass them along to all your friends, something bad will happen. These pesky emails have been around for as long as I can remember having an email and I've even forwarded a few. Granted, that was over ten years ago now (I must be getting old when I can say "ten years ago" and be talking about an event in my life *sigh*).

I've seen a lot of them. Below are some of my favorite types.

The Email Petition
You get an email with a stirring account of a politician gone wrong or a law that threatens our way of life. You must do something about it! Put your name at the bottom of the email and pass it on to your friends! When it reaches 1,000,000 names, it will be forwarded on to the White House and change will be affected!

Ahem.

In reality, these are a crock. The ones I've seen have instructions to forward, or will automatically be forwarded, to comments@whitehouse.gov. Real email address (possibly - I haven't checked); wrong place to send petitions. And just for the record, there is not a technology that automatically forwards an email like this once a certain number of names are on it.

The other inherent problem is the branching effect it gets when you send it to all your friends. Say you send it to 10 of your friends. There are now 10 copies of your name. They add their names to the list and send it to 10 of their friends. There are now 10 copies of the 10 different lists spread out among 100 people. And that only gets a total of 3 names on each list. Sure, there's 111 total names (assuming that there's no overlap in who received these chain emails), but they are spread over 100 emails with only 3 names on each.

There's also the verification that each name is a real, live, citizen who can actually can sign a petition. Anyone can write an email with 1,000,000 computer generated names on a petition and send it to the White House, but how do you verify the names on that list? Of course, since it's going to the comment box, it'll probably just get deleted.

The True Friend
So you get another one. It has a moving story about how someone was a true friend to someone else and it'll bring a tear to your eye and if there was a cause involved, you would be looking for the donation link. However, all it says is to pass it along to all your friends, or you're not nearly as much of a friend as the person in the story, you heartless jerk. If you get it back from one of the friends you forwarded it to, that means they are as friendly as the person in the story, too. The ones that don't send it back are heartless jerks.

Ahem.

If this was the true test of friendship, I would be the biggest jerk with the smallest heart. I delete these on sight, or if I've received several in recent history, I send a message to the sender asking them to not forward chain emails to me. Those two responses label me as a heartless jerk, according to these emails.

A true friend wouldn't need a cheesy, tear-jerker of a story in an email to know that you think of them as a friend. If you feel you haven't communicated with a true friend in a while, why would you send something like that instead of calling or visiting them and hanging out? Some meaningless crap email you didn't write or spending time out of your day with your friend; which would mean more to you?

The Conditional Response
Another one? This one, after a message that you have to hold the down key for 10 minutes so as to scroll smoothly down the email to read, says that you have to send it to 100 people in the next 20 seconds! If you do, your true love will respond back to you with a confession of their undying love for you! If you're too slow, you'll miss this ONE opportunity and will never know true love… However, if you send it to 50 people in the next 30 seconds, you'll win a trip to some exotic resort where you can forget about missing your ONE chance to find your soulmate. But if you're too slow on this one, your worst enemy will get the trip.

Ahem.

If I must detail the problems with this type, I guess I must. First off, what is with the pointless scrolling? Woo hoo. You can make the text dance when you scroll down continuously for 10 minutes. What's the purpose? There is nothing useful about doing this. Second, I repeat what I said earlier. There is no technology to track emails. There's no way for someone to know that you've sent an email to 100 people within 20 seconds of reading that line. There's nothing mystical about it either. Do you really think that you have only one chance to be with the person you'll spend your life with?

This, in my opinion, is one of the worst kinds of chain mail. There is no purpose to them. They clog up email servers and waste time with some fancy "ASCII animations." What happens if one of these messages gets spammed to a bunch of emails because a group of people forwarded it on to the 100 people? Email servers go down and companies have to pay someone to fix it. At best, communications are down for some people for a while. At worst, emails continue to clog the system and more servers going eventually down leading to the apocalypse!

*sounds of a struggle are heard followed by a few seconds of silence and some muffled yells*

Sorry, I stepped away for a second and ParanoidSoC got to the keyboard. The point is, there is no good from chain mails, especially these ones.

The Lie
Ah, the last one. It's a message with proof that the <insert government official here> is evil! See how it says that they were in a country within driving distance of where Osama bin-Laden was known to be at the time? It's obivous that they were meeting to plan the 9/11 attacks! And see here how they are reading from the <insert religious book here>! They've obviously taken up that religions evil ways and will begin persecuting all other faiths any day now! See the photos that prove that they kick puppies and eat babies! How did we let them into office! We must act NOW and get them out!

Ahem.

Granted, I've not seen one with quite as wild of accusations as this one, but a few have come close ("Obama's a Muslim or the AntiChrist" comes to mind). These ones tend to hide until just before and during the Presidential Campaign. It's easy to spot the obvious lies, but the real problem is when there's enough circumstantial evidence that people believe the entire thing without looking it up. The solution? Snopes. Whenever I get one of these, I like to look them up and send the link back to everyone who received the original message. This way, they get to see the facts, not just the lies. There are some that are partially or wholly true, but they are few and far between, especially the ones that aren't taking things out of context.

So in conclusion: Chain Emails = Bad. Do not forward them to your friends or post them in a MySpace bulletin or as a Facebook Note. Do not take them seriously (without some research at least). The best thing to do if you get one of these little wastes of code is to delete them. Remember: Only you can prevent mass chain mail forwarding!

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