As a childless magazine writer whose peaceful rural home makes a quarantine look basically indistinguishable from Yaddo, I do not have the excuse of being too overburdened to rummage through my cookbooks. I am not. One problem with this kind of organized emoting is that it is wildly at odds with the funerary traditions of Italian-Catholic mobsters.
Another is that the late Mrs. Soprano was so manipulative, embittered, narcissistic, and homicidal as to render her entirely eulogy-proof.
Watching the scene, in which all the other mourners studiously examine their freshly shined loafers, I felt a combination of vicarious horror and dismayed recognition. All this is to say that there are few things in life more irritating than coerced participation in an allegedly uplifting group activity. Granted, the line between that and just being a good sport can be a fine one, and it is drawn in different places by different people. The family dinner where, guest or not, everyone at the table is expected to join hands in prayer before tucking into the pot roast?
To my mind, perfectly acceptable. The corporate retreat where everyone is expected to take part in restorative breathing exercises before the budget meeting? You may have the opposite feeling. Because of these differences in opinion, it is possible to play neutral about feel-good chain e-mails—to claim that whether they are a wholesome stress-reliever or a demanding intrusion is simply a matter of taste.
But that is not quite true. I love taste. It is infinitely branching, endlessly interesting, and, all told, one of the most delightful and comic realms of human existence. But the thing about taste is that, although we all absorb some of it from outside influences, it is, by definition, a private matter—which is exactly what it ceases to be the moment you foist it on someone else.
That is the problem with the chain e-mail. The defining feature of chain e-mails, in other words, is that, unlike taste, everybody is obliged to share them, in every sense: endorse them, participate in them, send them along to others. For those of us who are disinclined to do so, that makes them—beneath their banal, formulaic, exclamation-mark-heavy prose—precision-engineered traps.
When the chain e-mail itself was born is, as I said, a matter of some mystery. To an unimpressed recipient, it may seem like the regrettable offspring of multilevel marketing and the four-page family holiday letter, but in fact its roots are much older than both of those. One person who has tried to unearth those origins is the folklorist Daniel W. VanArsdale, the curator of an archive of more than nine hundred chain letters and author of a digital publication called Chain Letter Evolution.
VanArsdale traces the form back more than a thousand years, to early religious texts that include demands for their own reproduction and promises of good fortune or eternal salvation to those who comply.
But it took many centuries, plus the rise of printing technologies, widespread literacy, and international mail, for the chain letter to assume its modern form. Here is a representative specimen, also in the religious vein, that appears to have originated in Massachusetts in We are making a novena to Our Lady of Fatima. It is not much and requires little time. Just one Our Father each day for nine days.
It is the first one started and is going around the world. Make nine copies of this letter and send them to nine different persons before the fourth day after receiving this letter. The fourth day after sending this, a favor will come to you. With its fanatical emphasis on numbers, protocols, and timing, the chain letter has more in common with astrology, witchcraft, and voodoo than with any mainline religion.
This particular example departs in only two ways from the standard formula. First, it is more modest than the majority of its kin, in that it merely proposes to circumnavigate the world, while most others claim to have already done so, often multiple times.
Second, it lacks a threat, even though chain letters traditionally menace their recipients: not only will good luck come to you if you send it along but terrible things await you if you do not.
Similar to Business Email Compromise attacks, chain messages are another form of internet fraud. Some ISPs prohibit propagating chain emails , so you may find yourself losing access to your account or getting blacklisted if you forward them.
Additionally, emails requesting money are illegal. As mentioned earlier, some chain messages can contain illegal content, and by forwarding them, you may even commit a criminal offense. These types of messages can ask for information such as a social security number, bank account information, or credit card information. For ISPs, it becomes challenging to protect businesses and every individual.
All it can take is for one person to forward one chain email, and already it can potentially reach a million inboxes in a matter of hours. This puts businesses and companies at risk of scams and fraud, while individuals are at risk of credit fraud or identity theft. Make sure to also take a look at our Lawful Interception Overview article for information and best practices on keeping your information as safe as possible.
Recognizing harmful chain emails is not very hard, but what should you do if you do want to forward something to your friends and family? Follow the best practices listed below:.
We learned how dangerous chain messages could be. The best thing to do would be not to open them and immediately discard them. Unfortunately, since spammers or cybercriminals can use email chains to attack any age group in any area, not everyone understands the threat they pose.
A free mail server version is also available, along with the business mail server and the MSP mail server , for Managed Service Providers, which also include features like personal organizer, AntiVirus, AntiSpam, or advanced security policies.
Rhode has an explanation for why it works:. This means that when you send your letters with your name in the fifth position, 9 people respond. They will have sent out letters with your name in the fourth position. Are you getting the idea? Double the figure for additional names you send letters to. It is all legal. Join the program, and keep percentages rolling. This is better known as a pyramid scheme, which the postal service made illegal after enough letters requesting money made their way through its offices.
Around a decade and a half ago, MySpace was the top social networking site; one of its features was an area for bulletins — reminiscent of those BBSs in the early days of the internet — that were immediately visible to all of your friends on the site. Chain letters, naturally, proliferated there because they were uniquely suited to the format.
Instant distribution ensured that death hoaxes e. The format underwent another change afterward, when chain letters collided with meme culture. All this, of course, only happens because having superstitions is a part of being human, and those irrational beliefs come from our biological ability to recognize patterns. That propensity to recognize patterns, he posits, is the reason humans are so cognitively sophisticated.
The appeal of chain letters is about control: By forwarding them we allow ourselves to believe that we can command the future.
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