about e-mails and spam

Laurie Seim gets loads of e-mail each week, including some that she doesn't even read. At least three times a week she can count on some form of chain e-mail appearing in her in box.

"Just because you receive an e-mail, doesn't mean you have to open it," said Seim, an Appleton resident.

Seim, like just about every other e-mail user, finds her account cluttered with get-rich-quick scheme offers, chain letters promising free merchandise if they're forwarded on and jokes of the day.

Most of what she receives counts as harmless fun, jokes, riddles, pictures and Web site links forwarded from her three children, ages 7, 11 and 15. The kids' friends forward the message to them regularly, Seim said.

"I've got some sweet, sentimental ones -- like ones that say you're the best friend in the universe," she said.

However, not all the messages carry well wishes.

"I did get this really interesting e-mail from the Middle East last week," she said. "Sounds like they were looking for help with money laundering."

Seim uses parental controls to block unknown users from sending such e-mails to her children, she said.

Dan Green, an avid AOL user and Green Bay resident, says about 90 percent of the e-mail he receives falls under the category of spam or chain e-mail. "I delete all mail I don't recognize," he said.

Invites to pornography sites, offers for "lucrative" home-based business opportunities and urban legends have begun to irritate him, he said.

"Like I'll really win a million dollars for passing on hundreds of e-mails," he said.

Nonetheless, the promise of gifts, from money to vacations, causes netizens to keep such e-mails circulating around the Net, sometimes for years, according to About.com's Urban Legend and Hoaxes Web site.

Such electronic messages prey upon people's laziness and wishful thinking, Seim said. "It's easy and quick and promises a payback," she said.

Like hackers and online child predators, there are enough people creating these mailings for harmful reasons -- getting personal information, taking money, sending out viruses.

"They want to say 'Look how many suckers fell for this,'" said Diane Blessing, an Appleton resident. But even experienced Internet users still fall for a hoax once in awhile.

While most of the people interviewed said they purge any reference to prizes or so-called freebies, many of them forwarded the notes when they mentioned "children in need."

Blessing has received stories about victims of drunken driving accidents. At the end of the e-mail, it promises to donate money to an organization like MADD or simply just warns people about the possible results of drinking and driving.

Certain messages do nothing but promote a good cause. For instance, when the U.S. postal Service launched its line of stamps promoting breast cancer awareness, advocates sent out mass mailings to drum up support and sales. That stamp proved to be one of the top sellers, according to Postal Service reports.

One campaign worked a little too well, according to David Emery, About.com's urban legends guide.

In 1989, a 9-year-old boy named Craig Shergold sent out a snail mail chain letter asking people to send him a postcard from their home towns. His goal was to get into "The Guiness Book of World Records."

He made his goal, but cards kept pouring in. They still pour in and his family has appeared on TV asking for it to stop.

Sometime in the 1990s, a well-meaning recipient of the letter took Shergold's (spelling varies in chain e-mails) to the Net. To this day, people still get the note and want to help the little British boy make his dream come true, Emery said.