Is chain letter spam or not?

In the recent years I have taught my friends not to send me any chain letters or those sweet presentations with cute puppies looking from the screen (not that I have anything against animals in general). But I got a question from my friend today regarding a particular chain letter. She wanted to know if it is spam or not. Or in other words, does it really make a difference if you sign it and send it to all your friends?

How to know if it is spam or not? Here are 4 main points you need to consider:

• read the content
• who is the author?
• how to contact the author?
• how signatures are collected?

The content of chain letters usually target human emotions. If you really read the content you will want to help. Even if it is only typing your name on the email and sending it to your friends. They create a reaction. Action calls are specific and easy to do. I don’t believe a chain letter will convince you to starve for one week but you might be more than willing to forward an email.

But before you sign it and send it it’s important that you check authenticity of the email. Is the company, organization or person whose name is written in it really the one who wants to raise the awareness?  It might seem so, but you will not be sure until you check the web site of a particular organization, person or cause.  But to check it you will need at least a name of the organization, email, postal address. If there is a name or postal address you can check them in google.com and if there is an email try if it’s valid and check if it belongs to the organization. Usually it won’t be @hotmaill.com, @google.com, @yahoo.com … but @”organization.org”.

The fourth point is one of the most obvious. If the signatures are collected on the web site and the chain letter contains a link to the web site of the authenticated organization you can be pretty sure you will be really signing a petition. But on the other hand if you are asked to add your name on the bottom of the email and send it to all your friends this is very likely a false signature. These emails that “require” your name usually have an instruction for the 5000th signee  – send the list to a particular (postal) address. If you think about how many names would have their duplicates, triplicates… in various lists then you can figure out this is not the most effective thing to do. Also think about all those lists that do not come to the number 5000. Are all those names then lost? And think about what if 5000th signee doesn’t send the list … are now all names lost again? Or consider this: why would the 5000th signee send it to a postal address? Emails seem to work well enough. And there are several million of printers in the USA.

So I advise you to answer only to those emails that have a link to the web site – a web site that is sure the web site of the person/organization it claims to be. And sign a petition there.

In the meanwhile I’ll go and check those 1500 people who have signed a chain letter … Mothers Against Drunk Driving.