> From the Chicago Tribune:
>
><http://chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/zorn/0,1122,SAV-0101290072,00.html>
ditto. for the most part. we did successfully use e-mail calls for help with requests to forward when University of Toronto's Grad Studs were striking. It may have gotten the attention of alum and the messages sent to the grad students warmed their hearts last year about this time. so, read them carefully, just look for signs of a hoax. liberal use of capitals, for ex, or no end-circulation-date.
to amplify the article: it's also the case the almost all of them are pranks played on some poor sucker whose e-mail address is the one you're supposed to send it to after the 50th, 100th, etc signature. maybe people think, "hey what can it hurt, it's just bandwidth or e-mail; delete it". however, the person who was the target of the prank, the ISP that hosts the account, etc don't think it's "just e-mail"
the idiotic "help Craig Shergold" hoax is over 10 yrs old now and it STILL gets 1000s of queries a day.
see for example The Taliban/Afghanistan's War on Women Hoax:
"Due to a flood of hundreds of thousands of messages in response to an unauthorized chain letter, all mail to sarabande at brandeis.edu is being deleted unread. It will never be a valid email address again. If you have a personal message for the previous owner of that address, you will need to find some means other than email to communicate. sarabande at brandeis.edu was not an organization, but a person who was totally unprepared for the inevitable consequences of telling thousands of people to tell fifty of their friends to tell fifty of their friends to send her email. "