Genealogy Chat

These sort of messages get sent on by less well-informed family & friends - so the names of the senders are recognisable - and it's harder to tell them they've been ''had'' without making them feel you think they're daft. Clearly ones like that from strangers wouldn't get as far as being looked at. Christine

Im the same Snowdrop, If I dont recognise your name then you get deleted. Yvonne x

Very wise. The problem arises when the chain has some heart-tugging message, and people fall for it without checking. One side-annoyance on this one is the extremely doubtful ethic of nicking someone's original poem and ascribing it to a dying child. I think that stinks. Christine

Have to say I'm with Nell on this. Virtually anything that arrives with email addresses of people I don't know gets deleted. The few that get passed on, I edit to eliminate addresses.

I don't respond to chain letters, never did when they were snail mail and just delete them now if they arrive in e-mail. nell

I am now in the habit of googling a few bits of critical info from any such e-mails that reach me (including - especially - the virus panics). In this case I chose: 'Dennis Shields' 'American Cancer Society' (using 'Dennis Shields' 'American Cancer Society' in inverted commas to make sure that the names were treated as whole items, not as separate components). Any e-mail which has no start date is open to question. Any which asks you to pass it on to as many as possible is immediately suspect - even if it asks you to pass it on to only a few, try the arithmetic... It's like that Chinese legend about the poor man who helped the emperor and who was offered any reward he wanted, but asked for 'only' rice grains on a chess board: one on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth... doubling each time. The emperor thought he was being asked for very little, but you find that the whole world could scarcely meet the demand from any one of the last few squares. That's why chain-letters usually contravene ISP rules: they clog up the e-mail system. But I never break the chain without checking at all, if it's something like this - just in case it's valid. Christine

This e-mail seems to have started up again. I've had it arrive from two different sources. I don't think there's any virus risk, it just clogs up the system. If you get one, please look at the following links (remove any *) before deciding whether or not to forward it. I would recommend that you don't. http://www.cancer.org/docroot/MED/content/MED_6_1x_Jessica_Mydek.asp?sitearea=MED http://www.davidlweatherford.*com/intro1.html & http://www.davidlweatherford.*com/slowdance.html (I think this guy's a Beatles fan!) http://www.snopes.*com/inboxer/medical/cancer.asp http://experts.about.*com/q/Urban-Legends-3056/RE-American-Cancer-Society.htm Christine

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