Posted: 06/07/99  Update

Our lesson for today concerns the awesome power and reach of chain email. For the unlikely few who've never enountered this phenomenon, I'm referring to messages that promise some sort of reward — warm, fuzzy feelings, if nothing else — for forwarding copies to everyone in your address book.

Based on the longevity of some Internet chain letters, the frequency with which they reappear and the media attention showered upon them (see the infamous Walt Disney Jr. message for one example), we estimate their circulation can sometimes balloon to seven figures. But, as no one else seems to have collected hard data on this, we must turn to experiments conducted by elementary school children for more definitive numbers.

"We heard from all 50 states and all 7 continents..."

Mr. Gusé's fourth grade class at Sieden Prairie School in Matteson, Illinois launched a chain letter experiment last January as part of a unit in U.S. geography. The premise was simple:

As the students themselves later noted on their Web page, the project rapidly transcended U.S. boundaries and turned into a lesson on world geography. They also learned a thing or two about math.

Even though the message only instructed each recipient to forward it to two other people, the volume of responses grew at a steady rate from a dozen a day in the beginning to more than a thousand a day in early March. That's when they gave up counting. According to the final estimate, more than 20,000 responses had been logged by project's end on March 22.

"We heard from American service men and women in remote areas and aboard ships," the students report. "We got emails in foreign languages, and good attempts at English. We heard from judges, one Governor, the FBI, NASA, moms, writers, and even from the Vice-President of the United States, Al Gore! We even got a phone call from The Pentagon."

They also received a few complaints, some accusing the class of spamming and wasting bandwidth. This is the customary (and justifiable) response to chain letters of all kinds from experienced Internet users, but the students defended their experiment thus: "You have to remember that to a 9-year-old, it is not always obvious what will happen. There was a sense of excitement in the classroom during this project. We graphed in math, we added, we mapped, we read, we researched, we wrote about, we talked of the customs of other countries, and we learned.... so much!"

Including, hopefully, that Internet chain letters can get out of hand.

"A class experiment run amok"

Mrs. Wimmer's fifth grade class at Mill Cove District School near Halifax, Nova Scotia sent out a similar email to exactly 15 family members and friends on April 7, 1999:

The message was clearly modeled after the Sieden Prairie letter. Note, however, that it says "send our class letter on to more people," not just "2 more people." What a difference a numeral can make!

From the Halifax Herald, April 20, 1999:

Officials pulled the plug on an Internet project at Mill Cove Elementary School after a class experiment ran amok, attracting thousands of unexpected email responses from all over the world.

"It was a simple class project for our Canada and the world studies program, but things got out of hand," said Grade 5 teacher Glynda Wimmer.

The Hubbards area class had to abandon its email address and obtain a new one after thousands of people from around the world responded within days to a request for information about their communities.

According to its Email Project Web page, the class received over 200 responses by the second day; over 9,000 by the end of the first week. By April 16, just 9 days after the project began, messages were flooding in at the rate of 150 per hour. That's when the email address had to be closed.

"We will be more careful about sending out email queries in future," said Mrs. Wimmer.

Like the students at Sieden Prairie, the Mill Cove class got responses from countries on every continent, including cities from Los Angeles to Sarajevo. As of early June, they were still tabulating the results.

On a darker note, the students also encountered one of the hazards of email chain letters. "We have just been informed," the Website notes, "that our original letter was altered during its travels and that someone re-routed some of the responses to other addresses. We do not have, and never have had, an address at AOL. The ONLY address we ever used was millcove@glinx.com and it has been closed since April 16. It is unfortunate that a few have caused undue frustration to an otherwise positive educational experience."

We can only guess at the motives of those who altered the message, but a likely scenario is that someone was collecting email addresses for spamming purposes.

Update on the Mill Cove project:

• Wired News - 06/11/99 - 'The Email Read Around the World'

Chain letter without end?

This final example was received on June 3, 1999, but we have no idea when it was launched because it contains no starting or ending dates – not a promising sign:

Know what this says to me? These second-graders may well still be counting emails into their college years.

October 1999 Update:

More 'Class Project' Chain Letters
Two more schools join the ranks of those overwhelmed by reponses to their geography projects