The Danger of Chain Emails
When I was in sixth grade, I received an email from a classmate. The message was bizarre. It was one of those kinds of emails that claimed to be magical. For instance, if you were to forward this email to 15 of your contacts, the email claims that you will be successful in life or that a puppy will be saved. Some of these emails were downright threatening, claiming to be "cursed" and that if you did not forward the email within a specific time frame, you will be hurt. There was no point in calling the police; in most cases, the sender was a fellow classmate or a friend that clearly had no interest in hurting you. Ultimately, I'd like to believe that even kids could see through the veil and understand that the messages were fake. So why do kids still ritually forward these messages? Because it's fun, I suppose. It doesn't feel like there's any harm involved in just forwarding an email to a friend that you know well – besides, there's the remote chance that the email is telling the truth, and maybe there is a puppy that could be saved by forwarding this email. These kinds of emails have a name: they're chain emails, and while their contents may be false, the dangers associated with them are very real.
When I received the email, the first thing the message contained was not the "cursed" message itself. Instead, I had to scroll through dozens upon dozens of forwarded email headers: the lines at the top of forwarded emails that tell you who originally sent the forwarded message and whom the forwarded messages was originally sent to. In this case, the message had been forwarded so many times and to so many people that I had to scroll down quite a bit through these email headers before I got to the contents of the email. When I read what it was about, I rolled my eyes. Maybe the first time I had received such an email, I got scared. On the umpteenth time, the joke gets pretty old.
It became a thing of mine to – instead of forward the chain email to people who hadn't received the message – click the "reply all" button and send the chain email back to everyone who had already received it, usually with some snarky message telling people not to send chain emails.
Once I started doing this, I began to realize how many names I recognized among the people contained in all the email headers, people whom I knew but did not have in my contacts. I began to use these emails as a method of collecting email addresses that I did not have beforehand. In my snarky "reply all" messages, I would sometimes directly say that I had their email addresses now, mostly to give them an incentive not to forward chain emails. It wasn't long before someone replied to one of my replies.
It was the dad of a kid whom I didn't know, but received my snarky reply email because a mutual friend had forwarded her the email. In my reply, I had directly written that "I use chain emails to find out what your email addresses are, and I save them to my contacts." The dad felt threatened by this – and understandably so. Their response to me was terse and commanding: I was to remove all of the contact information I had collected, inform him when this was done, then cease and desist from doing this again. If I didn't comply, he would contact my school or some other authority and seek disciplinary action against me.
Naturally, I didn't want to find out how much trouble this man could cause me, so I did what he told me to do and removed the contact information I had collected. In my response to him, I was apologetic, but I couldn't help but protest a little bit. I told him that I truly never meant his daughter or anyone else any harm. Instead, I meant to illustrate the danger that chain emails entailed. While you might only forward a message to your close friends, your friends will then forward the message to their friends, and so on and so forth until perhaps one day, the message gets forwarded to someone with malicious intentions. In the wrong hands, this message contains the contact information of many dozens of children. Even children who were smart enough not to forward a single one of these chain emails are at risk simply because they were included as recipients in the email headers. I had truly hoped that by sending chain emails back instead of forward, it would deter my friends from forwarding chain emails in the future. I ended my reply to him by saying I hoped he spoke with his daughter about these dangers.
I never received a response. On the other hand, I was never called down to the office at my school. It seemed that the father had found my reply satisfactory. Looking back on the experience, I am surprised at how diplomatically sixth grade me handled it. I had tried my best not to sound condescending to the father; I wanted him to know that I genuinely believed that chain emails were dangerous while equally conveying that I genuinely understood that what I did was wrong. It worked.
As time went on, the novelty of chain emails wore off, and I received fewer and fewer of them. As of today, I have not received one in at least five years. Nevertheless, I will never forget my exchange with the father. At the end of the day, the experience only further solidified what I had already believed: do not forward chain emails.
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| A classic chain email. Image source: Mashable |
When I received the email, the first thing the message contained was not the "cursed" message itself. Instead, I had to scroll through dozens upon dozens of forwarded email headers: the lines at the top of forwarded emails that tell you who originally sent the forwarded message and whom the forwarded messages was originally sent to. In this case, the message had been forwarded so many times and to so many people that I had to scroll down quite a bit through these email headers before I got to the contents of the email. When I read what it was about, I rolled my eyes. Maybe the first time I had received such an email, I got scared. On the umpteenth time, the joke gets pretty old.
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| Example of a forwarded email header (in the red box). Source: Capsule CRM |
It became a thing of mine to – instead of forward the chain email to people who hadn't received the message – click the "reply all" button and send the chain email back to everyone who had already received it, usually with some snarky message telling people not to send chain emails.
Once I started doing this, I began to realize how many names I recognized among the people contained in all the email headers, people whom I knew but did not have in my contacts. I began to use these emails as a method of collecting email addresses that I did not have beforehand. In my snarky "reply all" messages, I would sometimes directly say that I had their email addresses now, mostly to give them an incentive not to forward chain emails. It wasn't long before someone replied to one of my replies.
It was the dad of a kid whom I didn't know, but received my snarky reply email because a mutual friend had forwarded her the email. In my reply, I had directly written that "I use chain emails to find out what your email addresses are, and I save them to my contacts." The dad felt threatened by this – and understandably so. Their response to me was terse and commanding: I was to remove all of the contact information I had collected, inform him when this was done, then cease and desist from doing this again. If I didn't comply, he would contact my school or some other authority and seek disciplinary action against me.
Naturally, I didn't want to find out how much trouble this man could cause me, so I did what he told me to do and removed the contact information I had collected. In my response to him, I was apologetic, but I couldn't help but protest a little bit. I told him that I truly never meant his daughter or anyone else any harm. Instead, I meant to illustrate the danger that chain emails entailed. While you might only forward a message to your close friends, your friends will then forward the message to their friends, and so on and so forth until perhaps one day, the message gets forwarded to someone with malicious intentions. In the wrong hands, this message contains the contact information of many dozens of children. Even children who were smart enough not to forward a single one of these chain emails are at risk simply because they were included as recipients in the email headers. I had truly hoped that by sending chain emails back instead of forward, it would deter my friends from forwarding chain emails in the future. I ended my reply to him by saying I hoped he spoke with his daughter about these dangers.
I never received a response. On the other hand, I was never called down to the office at my school. It seemed that the father had found my reply satisfactory. Looking back on the experience, I am surprised at how diplomatically sixth grade me handled it. I had tried my best not to sound condescending to the father; I wanted him to know that I genuinely believed that chain emails were dangerous while equally conveying that I genuinely understood that what I did was wrong. It worked.
As time went on, the novelty of chain emails wore off, and I received fewer and fewer of them. As of today, I have not received one in at least five years. Nevertheless, I will never forget my exchange with the father. At the end of the day, the experience only further solidified what I had already believed: do not forward chain emails.