Chain Letters
By The Mad Man

I was chatting to a friend today asking for a quick favour and they said fine as long as I would do them one in return. Sure I was OK with that what's the favour?

They proceeded to tell me that they had received an email that if forwarded on to at least 3 other people and read then AOL will give the originator of the email 36 cents (yep this came from the Yanks) for each email read. This was going to be checked on by sophisticated AOL software that will check that the email has been read and forwarded on. This person would then get 36 cents towards his dying daughter.

Now me being me had to have some gentle words with my friend. Starting out with "Do you really believe this junk?" I was quite surprised that she did seem to believe it. So lets have a look at why you shouldn't believe this rubbish coming through in your email.

First of all no matter what the email is about you or someone is going to get good luck. Never works like that does it? I have never sent 20 emails during the day for works purposes and been given a cup of tea for my efforts. So sending on a chain email to 20 people I doubt that angels will suddenly appear and grant me my wishes - but only if I sent it within 5 minutes of receiving the message!

Secondly how do people think they are going to be tracking these email messages? No matter what is sent is crosses so many different platforms and into secure servers in companies around the world. So how will AOL's little tool track back all of the messages that are opened up and read and then forwarded on? If they did have this software then I'm sure that we'd be getting more and more spam as the hackers would have it on their computers and not AOL.

And last of all if this was real - such as this father getting 36 cents from AOL wouldn't everyone have heard about it? It'd be all over the news as if it was true this message could in theory be sent to millions in seconds and AOL would soon be straight out of business!

Get real people these things don't work at all. No angels will grant you a wish. You're love of your life wont call within 10 minutes of you sending on the email unless your love of you life is your boss and he has probably called you to tell you to do some bloody work and not send chain emails!

The only people that profit out of these messages are the amateur spammers or sales people. This is because as soon as this type of chain email turns up in their inbox they suddenly have a nice long list of active email addresses and sometimes work / home addresses and telephone numbers from auto signatures.

Think people! In the age of identity fraud do you really want to have your email address and company / home details to be flying around the interne attached to some soppy email promising 36 cents to some bloke you have never heard of.

If you don't send this document onto 10 people you will get a huge spot on the end of your nose and the love of your life will not call or give you 36 cents. Can you take that chance? Send it on people!