DON'T LET CHAIN MAIL MAKE A FOOL OUT OF YOU
 
It's easy to be taken in (as have thousands and thousands of others) by
the many kinds of chain mail which use various inducements to persuade
you to send the message on to as many people as possible, adding an
unnecessary load to the Internet, clogging mailboxes, and wasting
everyone's time.  These chain mail frauds can appeal to your
 
  FEAR -- The virus which will eat your hard drive if you open
  email with "XYZ" in the subject line, or twenty people died or
  lost their jobs because they did not pass this message on.
 
  CONCERN -- You can make a terminal cancer patient's dream come
  true, or induce XYZ Corp to give x cents to charity for every
  e-mail message you get people to send to it.
 
  GREED -- You will get x dollars for every pyramid of recipients
  you can start by mailing this to someone, or sending your credit
  card number to someone
 
To put it bluntly, when you pass this kind of thing on, you're the
the victim of some unpleasantly manipulative con artist who is getting
the same kind of satisfaction that someone in earlier days might have
obtained by throwing a firecracker into a chicken coop and listening
to the squawking.  Most of these messages have been circulating around
the Internet for months or even years, and because of the ever-present
request that the mail be passed on to as many people as possible, the
phenomenon spreads like wildfire -- and keeps spreading.
 
To protect yourself from being used like this, and to avoid being a
contributor to the needless degradation of service and people's time
caused by the proliferation of these foolish messages, do yourselves
and the Net a favor by checking whether any such message you get is
legitimate.
 
It's easy.  The Maryland K-12 community has a Web site which provides
you with a variety of links to sites that specialize in exposing
hoaxes and urban myths:
 
       http://www.inform.umd.edu/mdk-12/help/hoax.html
 
Just take a minute to look there whenever you get a message that asks
you to pass it along to as many people as you can --  however real or
well-deserving it may sound.  If it turns out to be a hoax, and you
care about the Internet, as I hope you do, take another minute to
write back to the person who sent it, explaining the situation (you
can use this note if you need wording).  Ask him or her -- as I am now
asking you -- to send your explanation (and a pointer to the hoax
page) to everyone s/he passed the message on to, AND the person who
sent it to him or her.
 
Please consider spreading the light of awareness to others to counter
the darker side of the Internet that is spread by chain mail.  Thanks
very much.