Don?t send chain e-mails to others
As anyone who knows me is aware, one of my major pet peeves is e-mail chain letters and hoaxes, most of which are simply efforts to clog up and slow down Internet traffic and generally create a major nuisance. The problem has become so prevalent that a number of Internet sites have sprung up in an effort to combat this ever-increasing problem.
As most people know, certain types of ?snail mail? chain letters have been banned by the U.S. Post Office, those that request money, bonds, books or other items of value, and promise a substantial return to participants. These sorts of pyramid schemes are patently illegal and can result in prosecution, jail time and/or fines.
But while most Internet e-mail chain letters are not scams on the face of it, they do serve a nefarious purpose, and have hidden costs. One Web site, called Hoaxbusters, notes how some so-called ?spammers? (bulk mailers of unsolicited mail) are busy harvesting e-mail addresses from hoaxes and chain e-mails. After a few generations, many of these letters contain hundreds of good e-mail addresses. In fact, it appears now that some of these businesses are deliberately starting hoaxes and chain letters precisely in order to gather these address lists.
Here are some sobering statistics on this problem published on the Hoaxbusters site.
?The cost and risk associated with hoaxes may not seem to be that high, and isn’t when you consider the cost of handling one hoax on one machine. However, if you consider everyone that receives a hoax, that small cost gets multiplied into some pretty significant costs. For example, if everyone on the Internet were to receive one hoax message and spend one minute reading and discarding it, the cost would be something like:
If 50,000,000 people spend 1/60 hour reading the message at an average cost of $50/hour = $41.7 million.
Most people have seen far more than one hoax message and many people cost a business far more than $50 per hour when you add in benefits and overhead. The result is not a small number. ?
Of course, one might wonder how this type of message could reach that many people. Well, it?s the nature of the chain e-mail that makes this possible. Most chain e-mails ask readers to send the message to everyone in their address book, but even if each recipient sent out only 10 messages, by the sixth generation the number is already at one million.
The really sad thing about all this is how morally bereft most of these individuals and businesses are. The messages are designed to tug at the heartstrings, like messages about some poor little girl with cancer, and who isn?t touched by something like that?
Most of these messages are flat out hoaxes or describe real situations that have been resolved years earlier. Even more troubling is that many of these types of messages contain very real computer viruses, and are a very effective way of distributing these damaging programs throughout the Internet. Be particularly wary of messages which ask you to open some sort of ?greeting? or ?movie.? If the file name ends in ?.exe? avoid it like the plague.
A perfect example of an e-mail hoax that has been making the rounds again lately is the ?UPS Uniforms Hoax,? which claims that a recent huge purchase of UPS uniforms has been made on eBay and that terrorists could use the uniforms to ?drop off anything to anyone with deadly consequences.?
Obviously this message is designed to cause fear, but it could also cause problems for one of the major delivery companies in the world for no reason.
It all comes down to this, if the message says at any point ?send this on to everyone you know,? hit the delete button as quickly as you can. You?ll be doing us all a favor.
Charlie Johnson is news editor of the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191.