Community weekly poll: 10/29/04 What do you do when you receive a chain letter in your e-mail?

10/29/04 What do you do when you receive a chain letter in your e-mail?

by Lee Koo (ADMIN)  - 10/28/04 5:39 PM

What do you do when you receive a chain letter in your e-mail?

-- Read it and forward it on as instructed.
-- Read it and delete it.
-- Read it and reply to sender to tell him or her to stop sending spam.
-- Delete it before reading it.
-- Report the sender as spam, even if that person is your mom.

Here are a few discussions to start you off:

How do you exactly handle the situation?

Do these chain mails drive you crazy or what?

Here's what I do.

For the people who email these chain letters to me, I usually read them and never forward them on because I know exactly what these emails create--more Internet congestion.

If I receive a chain email that contains so called "virus fixes" or "Microsoft is going to give you XX amount of dollars for forwarding this email blah, blah, blah…" that's when I reply and tell them to be careful about what they just forwarded because they are doing a huge disservice to your friends and family by spreading the disease of ignorance. I usually reference this site to see if they are true or not: http://www.snopes.com/ and call them on it.

For those who forward these type of emails to me often, I send them a friendly reply to not to send me these emails again—it's a nice email, but a firm one.

I only get upset when people forward me an chain mail that includes everyone's email address in plain site either in the content of the email or the To: line. This I do not stand for! And I usually call them directly to tell them to use BCC or just don't send me this type of crap again. I know I'm harsh, but I need to make sure that they understand--what they have just done, is forwarded my email address to a whole bunch of people that I don't know and subjected innocent by-standers like myself to more spam and other potential harms like viruses, etc…

Anyhoos that's just my two cents worth…

What are your thoughts? Have fun with this discussion.