mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (11/22/83)
I see the famous chain letter is still making the rounds. This letter originated at MIT (as far as I can tell) in February 1982 and has apparently toured the ARPANET, DECNET, and is now breaking out onto UUCP. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS TO OTHER PEOPLE ELECTRONICALLY. It costs a lot of places a lot of money in phone bills and serves no useful purpose. If necessary, sites from which is it remailed may be taken off the net. (Let's hope it doesn't come to that.) I believe chain letters are illegal, and the high cost associated with this one (it's up to 16K bytes or so now) makes this one especially serious. I also suspect this letter could be considered a pyramid scheme, which is even more illegal. For those of you that are curious about the content, it's the usual chain letter you get on paper. (Send money to the top address on the list, this guy didn't and bad things happened, this guy did and got rich, religious overtones, etc.) It isn't even interesting (except to read the names of all the turkeys that passed it on - they are all recorded in there!) If people are really interested, let me know - I am willing to post it to net.sources, along with two other chain letters I've received (and not forwarded) that actually do make interesting reading. Hopefully then everybody will have seen it and there will be no point in individual mass mailings. Mark Horton