Chain mail

When was the last time you received a chain mail? May be today. I received one today which prompted me to write this post, this probably is going to be the most informative thing ever on this blog.

I have been using email for over 10 years and I can say chain mail or email is one of the most annoying things on internet and specifically what gets to me is how easily people are fooled by these scammers. Chain mail is the prime example of social engineering where these scammers take advantage of people's emotions. Below I list some of the very popular forms of these emails.

1. Earn money by forwarding this email.
2. Send this email to 10 people or bad luck will befall you.
3. If you love your mother send this email to everyone on your list.
4. Sick Girl(Little Kimberly Anne is dying of a horrible tropical disease)
5. Forward this mail to everyone and Bill Gates will give you $1000.
6. E-Petitions.

Beware! The chain mails are fooling you. I will tell you why any of the above claims won't work.

Some of them are insanely stupid like the bad luck ones. Read on for the others which involve money and the e-petition ones. In the absence of information such as physical address and phone number an email cannot be binded to a person, so any name on the list can be fake and still unverifiable. Anyone can easily put a number of non existing email addresses in the list without letting anyone know. It is not entirely impossible to receive the same email multiple times, so there will be enormous amount of repetition in a list. If you ever tried to email the person who originated the chain mail, you would find that it's a fake email address. Even if it was real, the ISP instead of giving money for forwarding the chain mail will delete the account for generating so much of bad traffic.
Chain mails are unethical. Chain mailers put pictures of people in distress and play with your emotions which compel you to forward these emails. Don't do that, not only is it unethical it is also illegal. Chain mails by US mail are illegal and although chain email is not illegal, it is against the terms and conditions of any ISP. If your service provider knew you were forwarding chain emails it could delete your account at its own will.

If you want to read further please see these links.

http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/chainletterhoaxes.php
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/chain-letters.html
http://www.theburleys.net/chain.html
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/10.11.97.html

Happy E-mailing!