Chain Letters

[sobrique]

I hate chain letters.
The are evil.
I've just had one from someone, who's forwarded it to everyone in the company.
About a little girl in phuket who can't remember anything, and has lost her parents, with a photo attachment

I felt the need to reply:

"Tragic though it is, chain letters really don't help matters much. After all, this little girl has already been re-united with her family.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/tsunami/lostgirl.asp

Then if you take a 60kb chain letter, and multiply it by all the users in $COMPANY, being 55,000, you use up 3.5Gb of disk space, and the bandwidth necessary to transmit it.
The disk space (including backups) costs us around £600 per year.
The bandwidth would tie up the entirety of a 2Mb site internet connection for about 5 hours, slowing down all our other network traffic in the meantime.
This is leaving aside the cost of 55,000 employees each taking 30 seconds to stop and read this email, which works out at about 450 man-hours.
If they then send it on, then the problem multiplies."

Grr. Where's my LART.

Edit:

Have now had a response

"I'm sorry for wasting your time, this only came to me this morning and I didn't know she had been reunited with her family. But I would rather waste people's time than think it wasn't my problem.

Regards"

Comments

[zaitan.livejournal.com]

Somebody at our site received a similar one about a small boy, they then decided that it would be a good idea to send it to the list for all staff in the institution. Fortunately I am the moderator for the list so it did not go out.

On a related note, how are you supposed to educate your family about netiquette. My sister sent an email to several people (without using BCC) with a story attached. 80 lines of text in a word document, that had been pasted from an email that had been forwarded several times. This bloated it to 140 lines with little sodding chevrons all over the shop with some lines having just one word on them. Grr.

[the-wood-gnome.livejournal.com]

big stick with a nail in it?

[zaitan.livejournal.com]

Not quite as subtle as I had in mind, I think I may go with the next suggestion.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The next time you talk to your sister in person, you need to keep leaping around, waving your hands in the air and making little clicky noises between words. When she asks you what you're doing, tell her that's what her email sounded like when you read it in your head, and that clearly she wants everybody to sound like this otherwise she would have taken out the chevrons and spare lines.

[zaitan.livejournal.com]

Very good plan, I will have to give it a go. Although I have this terriable fear of offending people, I already have it reformatted but I have not sent it to her yet. It is ironic that I manage an email server at work, but I do not like email as a form of communication that much.