More days than not I receive at least one chain email.   The ones that make me truly crazy are the ones where the kindness of friends and family are being exploited by the lie that the email is being tracked and one charitable cause or another will receive money if you forward this to as many people as possible.  More likely the email will eventually be received by a spammer or scammer and used as a new source of email addresses.

The most compelling argument against these chain emails is that e-mail tracking with a tracking device is impossible. Since the e-mail tracking hoax first originated (in the late 1990s), there have been many great strides in e-mail technology that allow some degree of tracking in very controlled environments and circumstances, but tracking on the level suggested by most chain emails simply isn't feasible or desirable.

It isn't feasible because of the simple numbers game. If you forward this chain to ten people who, in turn, pass it on to ten more, and so on, we get one million copies in just 6 generations. At the $2 per forward rate, this would add up to $2,000,000 in just a couple of hours. Now, consider the fact that many chains have been around for more than half a decade in at least a dozen different countries and you'd have a charitable commitment of trillions!   And it would take years to sort out the duplicates that would inevitably be created.  If this were the slightest bit feasible every religious organazation in America would be using it...and I would have started with my church years ago.

It isn't desirable because of privacy issues. Even if AOL and YAHOO! (or whatever companies are named in the version you received) had the ability to know to whom you forward a message (which they don't), would you really want them to? If they could track how many times you forward a message and to whom, what else could they track? At a time when identity theft is the fastest-growing crime worldwide, this would be a most undesirable thing. But, most people are so caught up in the altruistic theme in these chains that they don't stop to consider the serious privacy issues that would surface if such a thing really were real.

That there is nobody overtly tracking this message doesn't mean that forwarding it on is harmless, either. While they can't be tracked in the manner described above, they can be (and are) collected. E-mail tracking hoaxes were most likely created initially to poke fun at and exploit naive new e-mail users. But, recently, e-mail hoaxes have taken on a darker side. Many spammers and scam artists now employ or seek out chains to build their mailing lists. When you forward a chain on to others, you're putting your e-mail address and likely those of your friends and family out in the wild to be collected. If you've been wondering why you get so much unwanted e-mail, the answer may be no further than your "Forward" button. The more chains you send, the more junk you will receive.

Don't want the junk? Break the chains.