How many times do you receive an email that says "mail this to ten of your friends and you will receive a great fortune?" "Send to 10 of your favorite people just because you love them..."
Most of us see messages like this once or twice a week, not realizing that the underlying cost of forwarding is overwhelming. The biggest risk is the ability to multiply.
Consider sending a message to 10 people in your address book. The first person sends it to 10; each member of that group of 10 sends it to 10 others or 100 messages and so on.
Generation Chart:
By the sixth generation there are a million e-mail messages being processed by our mail servers. The capacity to handle these messages often causes mail servers to slow down to a crawl or crash. We all know how annoying it is when email slows to a crawl.
This is also a clever way for spammers (bulk mailers of unsolicited mail) to to collect email addresses. After a few generations, many of these letters contain hundreds of good addresses, which is just what the spammers want. This is one of the reasons why YOU receive so much SPAM! We ask that you help stop this activity; please stop forwarding email hoaxes and chain letters. See: http://www.spamlaws.com/state/ca1.html
Before you pass it on, want to know if that email letter is a HOAX? Check here: http://www.datafellows.com/virus-info/hoax/