kids in Georgia need help

Subject: kids in Georgia need help
From: Art Thieme
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 09:47 AM

Good people,

A friend sent me the following E-mail:

Hello!

We are in grade 5 at Bill Arp Elementary School in Douglasville, GA which is about 20 minutes west of Atlanta, GA USA. We have decided to map an email project. We are curious to see where in the world our email will travel between the period of Sept. 21 - Nov. 19, 1999. We would like your help. If you recieve this message, we would like you to do two things: 1) Email us and tell us where you live. 2)Forward our message to as many people as you can.
Thank you for any help you can give!

Our email address is [e-mail]

Yor friends,

Mr. Blevins Grade 5 Class
Douglasville, GA

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: Jeri
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 10:09 AM

Chain Letter: "A letter directing the recipient to send out multiple copies so that its circulation increases in a geometric progression as long as the instructions are carried out." Webster's II, New Riverside University Dictionary, 1984

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: Big Mick
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 10:28 AM

And your point is??? Art, I sent it out poste haste. I hope catters in other countries will respond. Sure it is a chain letter, but that doesn't inherently make it bad. This is just a bunch of kids asking to receive a letter from around the world. They are not asking for money, nor are they promising bad luck and all that.

Mick

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: Jeri
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 10:46 AM

Chain letters clog up the net, and clog up servers. If they started by sending this letter to just five people, and those people 1) waited until the next day to send it, and 2) only sent it to five people, and this continued, by the tenth day, there would be 48,828,125 separate e-mails out there. I don't even want to think about going the full 19 days. These things may be well-intentioned, but they cause problems. That account will probably be mail-bombed with replies. Good thing the address isn't on their school's server.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as an old meany, but it's a sore point. More info at

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: Art Thieme
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 11:04 AM

If ya don't wanna do it, then don't do it. ;-) Ham radio operators get those C.Q. cards from all over the world just to stroke their egos about who and where they were able to contact. The teacher is trying to show his students how cool the web can be. At least that's what I want to believe is going on here. It is kind of sad that we're so ready to accentuate the negative rather than the positive possibility that this just might be benign.

Art

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: Big Mick
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 11:10 AM

Jeri, I just reread my post and it came off snippy. Sorry. I suspect it is as Art said. I sent the letter. But one problem...........I got the email back as undeliverable.

Mick

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: Jack (Who is called Jack)
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 12:06 PM

Most ISP and university network providers view chain letters as cause for revoking network accounts.

I know a university that got blacklisted by the internet community, and lost its ability to send e-mail to addresses outside its own LAN.

Regardless of its face value, I'd recommend not responding.

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: MMario
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 12:14 PM

In this case I would first check with the school to see if this is a valid project. I saw one last year from a Canadian school - and did not recieve an answer to my query for several weeks. when I did, they thanked me for checking as the project had NOT come from their school district and had crashed their mail server and continued to crash it for days.

MMario

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: bob schwarer
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 12:17 PM

Looks as if they have already swamped the system.

Bob S.

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: Allan C.
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 01:34 PM

Yep. My reply bounced as well.

Subject: RE: kids in Georgia need help
From: U-Ben-Had
Date: 28 Sep 99 - 02:04 PM

Suggestion: next time check the ONLINE HOAXES...
before responding, however, well intentioned.

There is practically no reason to forward any messages to "as many people as possible". No matter what the message may claim about the need for sympathy, goodwill, condemnation or action, if you can't verify that the message is true, its likely that someone is trying to make a fool of you.

Chain_Letter letters

* HOAXES *
Next time...
PLEASE, PLEASE check out the validity of the request and Email address before cluttering up the net with more useless garbage!