Why are chain letters bad?
For mostly the same reasons that hoaxes are bad. Postal chain letters offering monetary rewards are illegal in the U.S. of A. Consequently, electronic chain letters offering monetary rewards are also illegal. However, the problem is more that us wanting you to keep your nose clean. Electronic chain letters are a great burden to those of us who manage computer systems that handle e-mail. If you send a message to ten people, that message is stored ten times. If they send it to ten people, it’s stored one hundred times. If those one hundred send it to ten people, it’s stored one thousand times. You can see that it’s an exponential growth; one that will eventually kill any e-mail server, no matter how expensive the hardware is. To make matters worse, chain letters are usually forwarded, which attaches e-mail headers to the message body; resulting in a very large message. When this message is stored, it consumes a lot of disk space. When this message is sent, it consumes a lot of CPU time b
