Chain Email=Social Networking & Even MORE Spam?

I personally hate receiving chain emails (chain mails), but recently I’ve considered them to be something more than a waste of time: a form of involuntary social networking.

You can often see who forwarded the chainmail to who at least for a few steps back. You can see who the email was sent to at various points down the line, and you can see mutual contacts you have, and also you can see who your friends’ friends are, much like MySpace or Friendster, and in certain ways observe various aspects of the Six Degrees of Seperation (this is somewhat minimal, of course, as not everyone has an email address). Interestingly, one of the World’s first social networking sites, SixDegrees.com, was based on this concept.

A chainmail is a spammers dream. If a spammer was to get hold of a chainmail, it may have got sent to (and your email may contain) hundred of emails it was forwarded to prior to you receiving it. In many email clients, replying to an email automatically adds the sender to the address book. If you were to reply to a piece of spam and then to forward a chainmail to everyone in your address book, the spammer could receive hundreds of addresses.

The annoying thing about chainmail is that you don’t want to class it as spam, as it will stop good emails from your contacts reaching you, and you can’t opt-out. Its something we all have to live with, but by people forwarding chainmails they are circulating your email address potentially with 1000s of complete strangers. However, sometimes the entire history of the email isn’t sent (I guess it depends on your client).

We are talking about considerable amounts of people. A recent email I got, which only had 6 rounds of forwarding, contained a mere total of 35 email addresses. But consider an email is forwarded initially to 10 people, who each forward it to another 10 people and soforth. The second wave of people who receive it will have 21 emails in it, increasing by 10 each time. So the tenth wave would get 101 email addresses. Some chainmails are literally sent to 100s of people and then we are talking about extremely large amounts of people.

To put it simply, if you forward a chainmail, you are not only exposing your email, you are exposing that of your friends and your friends’ friends. And I’m sure not all of them would be happy about that. Also, if the email was to get onto a mailing list it may appear on an online archive where spambots would be very happy to find so many emails.

It is not just I who discourage chain mail, it is in breach of Yahoo!’s ToS and against the IETF’s Netiquette advice. I expect you would lose many friends if you reported them to their ISP, though.