The Chainbreaker

You probably received one already. Promises of a happy life, love, money and sometimes even God is involved in those nasty chain letters. Ya know, those mails you get from time to time asking you to forward it to a certain number of people or else your cat would die, you'll never get an erection again, you will lose your job, you'll find out your father is a drug dealer and you will be crushed by a baby blue '68 Ford Maverick GT V8 with 5 nuns inside.

But why do I hate that stuff so much? First, it is annoying. Many many people, for some reason send me that stuff. OK, I must admit I read some of them, and sometimes I even forward it to two or three people if it is something actually interesting (about only 0.001% of the time). But most of the time, I simply delete them, even though Gmail give me away more than 2 gigs so I don't need to delete all my crappy mail to receive actual e-mails (or more crappy chain mails), which leads to the second reason I don't like it, it's just a bandwidth waste.

You might think that a single e-mail wouldn't hurt that much, but consider this: You get a mail from someone. Then you forward it to ten other people. Each of those ten people forward to ten other people. Those people (who are now 100), send it again to more ten people, totaling 1,111 messages exchanged if it is propagated only three times. If that message were propagated seven times, there would be 1,111,111 people receiving the same stupid message. Let's say this message contains a small picture and some text, making it roughly 100KB in size. The total bandwidth spent would something like 105 GB, enough to clutter more than 50 Gmail mailboxes with all that crap.

And here comes the third and final reason: It's useless! I lost count of how many mails I got searching for that Maddie girl, and I probably bet people in Portugal and England get them on a daily basis. If it was so effective, people would probably have found her (or her body) by now.

Anyway, don't forget to not forward this to any person, or else your brother (or sister, father, mother or anyone else you care a lot (even yourself)) will lose his/her gallbladder, you might be attacked by a group of ferocious muay thai fighting ferrets, you just might get caught in the next Great Molasses Flood or maybe you'll just get hit by a random ICBM.