What is a chain letter? An e-mail chain letter is any message that, either through overt instruction or through compelling content, encourages the reader to pass it on.
• What’s so bad about chain letters? The most obvious answer is that many of them are complete hoaxes. But even when they contain accurate information, they can do damage because e-mail is not a reliable medium to transmit information to large groups. All chain letters pose a serious risk to your privacy and that of your friends, as your contact information could end up being circulated around the globe uncontrollably. For more reasons most chain letters should be broken, read “C’mon, What Can It Hurt?” in the Chain-Breaker’s Library. • Why is e-mail a terrible tool for spreading information? E-mail lacks three important ingredients that make the mainstream media relatively trustworthy: Reliability (the message can be trusted to be unchanged from its original), validity (the source is identified and qualified to provide the information) and accountability (the author or publisher of the information takes responsibility for it and will answer to any criticism).
Related Questions
- What is a chain letter? An e-mail chain letter is any message that, either through overt instruction or through compelling content, encourages the reader to pass it on.
- Does the EPCS spam filtering process look at the content of e-mail messages to determine if it is a spam message?
- What languages and character sets does E-mail to Fax support in the message content?
