The ones that require the recipient to forward the letter for one reason or another drive me nuts. Like this totally useless one I got recently (hint: there's nothing wrong).

    What's wrong here

    AAA
    BBB
    CCC
    DDD

<snip>

    XXX
    YYY
    ZZZ

    Did you know that 80% of UCSD students could not find
    the error above? Repost this with the title "what's 
    wrong here", and when you click "Forward ", the answer
    will be really obvious.

The worst thing is we're seeing the EXACT SAME THING in disguise as social-viral-loop-Facebook-app nonsense. "Your friend rated you! To see the results, rate 10 friends first!"

And I wonder why I stopped using Facebook soon after they launched the app platform...

This is a great simple example of social engineering.

In my experience, those chain letter emails almost always came from my mum. ;-) At least until I asked her to stop forwarding them to me.

Seriously though, I haven't had one of those for what must be years. Are they still going strong and I just happen to be spared? Or is all of this stuff happening on Facebook, etc. these days? (By the time Facebook was open for me to register, its appeal was gone, so I never did. There's a story there but I'll leave that for another day.)

I experience the same thing as I haven't gotten many chain letters in a long time. This is due, I think, to two things:

1) I trained my family to either stop emailing this stuff or stop emailing me this stuff. I would do a quick search on the topic which usually ended up with sending everyone a quick sentence asking to read the snopes article I linked.

2) I am in a different social network that is insulated from the "main stream" social networks (I'm just saying different, no more no less). The people who are connected between networks are my filters. I assume that most of them are literate enough to stop forwarding this junk from one group to another. There was a technology magazine article I scanned a while back which explained visualizing social networks that better illustrated what I have feebly described.

Have to agree. I used to reply (basically) "You're an idiot, here's a snopes link explaining why".

When that didn't work, I used Reply All, which basically added "and now I've told all your friends that you're an idiot".

Haven't received a forward in a long, long time...also have a lot less email-only 'friends'.

I used to get a lot of this crap then I did the following:

1. I did a "reply all" (Everyone address is always in the To or Cc with these things) and asked very nicely that people stop sending me "chain mails and other jokes".

2. I wrote a giant email about how chain mails are basically for idiots and sat and waited for the first person to ignore my nice email. When that happened in a day or two, I did another "reply all" and emailed my dissertation out 50 times.

3. I did that once more to a different chainmail.

I've never received a chainmail or other retarded email since. :-)

Jon Kleinberg... he's the guy who wrote my graduate algorithms course textbook. And reportedly did the research that eventually inspired PageRank.

I'm not sure what's worse.

1. That I get these emails

or

2. That the gooberment spent probably $3million for this "research"