03-30-2004, 11:47 PM
Chain letters were once a fairly common snail-mail occurrence. The letters often contained a list of names and addresses and instructed you to send a specified amount of money to the person at the top of the list, add your name to the bottom, and then send the same letter to ten people you knew. The letter promised that within a few weeks or months, you would receive back a huge amount of money when your name reached the top, based on the principle of exponentially increasing returns. The problem: if you do the math, you discover that within a few generations of the letter, everyone in the world will have received it - long before your name reaches the top and you become the recipient of the money.
Because they are a form of "pyramid scheme" that defraud those who believe the promises, not to mention an annoyance, chain letters that promise something of value are illegal in most jurisdictions in the U.S. However, with the advent of the Internet, another type of chain letter has emerged and is clogging e-mailboxes along with all the other spam.
These letters often seem innocuous enough. Rather than asking you to send money, they contain a poem or story and ask you to forward it to ten (or some other number) of your friends. Many people pass them on without a thought. After all, what's the harm? You aren't even asking people to spend money on stamps!
The problem is this: Internet bandwidth is not infinite. Every piece of unwanted mail that goes over the 'Net uses bandwidth and costs someone money, somewhere. ISPs have to pay more for additional T-1s and Internet backbone connections as the volume of traffic rises. More mail for their customers means a need to upgrade mail servers. Those costs eventually are directly or indirectly passed on to the customer. Dealing with unwanted e-mail also costs people time, and as the old saying goes, "time is money." These chain letters usually take more time than more blatant spam messages, because they often come from people you know. Thus, you're more likely to open them and spend time reading to determine that the chain mail isn't really a personal message.
Folks who send these messages tend to ask, "what's the big deal? Just hit 'Delete' if you don't like it." Particularly insidious, though, are some of the chain messages I'm seeing recently. They include, like many of the old snail-mail messages, statements that if you don't pass the message on, bad things will happen to you. They often include stories about how one person sent out the message and suddenly won the lottery, while another ignored it and died in a horrible accident a few days later. The implied threat is something that most of us will just brush off, but it victimizes the superstitious and naive. In my opinion, it's reprehensible to try to scare someone into participating in something like this.
What do you think? Are Internet chain letters harmless fun, or are they, at best, a breach of Netiquette? Have you ever forwarded a chain e-mail? Do you think e-mail chain letters should be against the law like their snail-mail counterparts?
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Because they are a form of "pyramid scheme" that defraud those who believe the promises, not to mention an annoyance, chain letters that promise something of value are illegal in most jurisdictions in the U.S. However, with the advent of the Internet, another type of chain letter has emerged and is clogging e-mailboxes along with all the other spam.
These letters often seem innocuous enough. Rather than asking you to send money, they contain a poem or story and ask you to forward it to ten (or some other number) of your friends. Many people pass them on without a thought. After all, what's the harm? You aren't even asking people to spend money on stamps!
The problem is this: Internet bandwidth is not infinite. Every piece of unwanted mail that goes over the 'Net uses bandwidth and costs someone money, somewhere. ISPs have to pay more for additional T-1s and Internet backbone connections as the volume of traffic rises. More mail for their customers means a need to upgrade mail servers. Those costs eventually are directly or indirectly passed on to the customer. Dealing with unwanted e-mail also costs people time, and as the old saying goes, "time is money." These chain letters usually take more time than more blatant spam messages, because they often come from people you know. Thus, you're more likely to open them and spend time reading to determine that the chain mail isn't really a personal message.
Folks who send these messages tend to ask, "what's the big deal? Just hit 'Delete' if you don't like it." Particularly insidious, though, are some of the chain messages I'm seeing recently. They include, like many of the old snail-mail messages, statements that if you don't pass the message on, bad things will happen to you. They often include stories about how one person sent out the message and suddenly won the lottery, while another ignored it and died in a horrible accident a few days later. The implied threat is something that most of us will just brush off, but it victimizes the superstitious and naive. In my opinion, it's reprehensible to try to scare someone into participating in something like this.
What do you think? Are Internet chain letters harmless fun, or are they, at best, a breach of Netiquette? Have you ever forwarded a chain e-mail? Do you think e-mail chain letters should be against the law like their snail-mail counterparts?
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