A typical chain letter consists of a message that attempts to induce the recipient to make a number of copies of the letter and then pass them on to one or more new recipients. A chain letter can be considered a type of meme, a self-replicating piece of information that uses a human host to distribute copies of itself. Common methods used by chain letters include emotionally manipulative stories, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, and the exploitation of superstition to threaten the recipient with bad luck or even physical violence if he or she "breaks the chain" and refuses to adhere by the conditions set out by the letter.

Chain letters are capable of evolution, generally improving their ability to convince their hosts to replicate them over time. This sometimes occurs through deliberate modification of the chain letter by a recipient, or sometimes through purely accidental imperfect copying.

With the development of e-mail and the Internet, chain letters have become much more common and quick to spread than when they were transmitted purely by physical mail, although RFC 1855 explicitly discouraged them as a breach of netiquette. Some e-mail providers prohibit users from sending chain e-mails in their terms of service (see chain e-mail).

There have been Himmelsbriefe ("Heaven letters") since at least the Middle Ages. And one could look to the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a meme that promised resurrection to those intombed with a copy.

Any recipients of such letters are generally advised to ignore and discard them.

Chain letters have become popular in the MySpace community, many of which are in the form of MySpace bulletins. MySpace chainletters often times have intimidating hoaxes.

Gaia Online, a forum site, has also seen a great increase in chainletters in their Private Message system after the reactivation of the "Send to Friendslist" feature, which lets users send more than one hundred letters at a time. Chain letters on the site mainly include petitions for site layout revisions, and new content for the site's avatar system.

Another example is the style that suggests adding your name and country (e.g. Joe Bloggs, England) to the bottom of the list and simply seeing how far it gets around the world.

See also

• Chain e-mail
• Mail fraud
• Make money fast
• Amish Friendship Bread (a culinary version of a chain letter)
• Samizdat - a chain-letter-like means of publishing and distributing forbidden material under Soviet rule
• Mon cher Mustapha letter - a chain letter used as a form of black propaganda
• The Cursed Videotape - a fictitious chain-letter-like supernatural object.

External link and references

• Daniel W. VanArsdale, chain letter evolution (1998), a paper reviewing the evolution of chain letters.
  • Online version: http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html

• United States Postal Inspection Service on chain letters: http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/chainlet.htm

• Category at ODP

• What's wrong with chain letters?

• A discussion of the history and various types of chain letters (from Snopes.com)

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