CAUTION: CHAIN E-MAIL AHEAD Do you get email chain letters that are either a) an appeal to you politics, b) an appeal to your sense of outrage, c) an appeal to your fear, or d) an appeal to your warm and fuzzy heart/friendship? You know the ones - send this on to 20 of your closest friends and also back to the person who sent it to you? (I never did get that - it's kind of like one of your neighbors keeping tabs on your charitable giving by having you put a check in a little envelope that they will collect and forward to the American Heart Association.) Who sits around thinking up the email with the little angels and the warm puppy getting together to tell you what a wonderful person you are? Who has that kind of time? Or inclination, for that matter? That alone makes me very suspicious. Who is making money from this? The internet is all about money. I just Googled "chain emails" and got 1,970,000 hits (in .17 seconds, by the way.) There is even a site called . . .(drum roll, please) . . ."ChainLetters.net, The E-mail Junkyard" at http://chainletters.net. Can you believe it? There are even sub-categories like "Humor", "Hoaxes", "ASCII", "Hopeful", "Surveys" and "Misc". Under Hoaxes I found "How to Survive a Heart Attack While Alone" and, my personal favorite, "How to Give a Cat a Colonic Hoax." I think you could probably find just about every piece of junk mail ever sent by someone you know. The question is, what do you do with it? How many do you recognize? How many have you forwarded? And the final question: are you going to continue forwarding them? Choose wisely.
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