"What are hoaxes and chain-letters?"

First of all, I'll explain what's a chain letter:
Not everyone has the same level of knowledge about computers and Internet. Chain-letters are messages that people receive, containing something that convinces the receiver to forward the message to somebody, or (as in most cases) to everyone he knows.

"That seems logic. And where do the 'Hoaxes' come in?"

Well, that's the sad part of all this. About 99% of the times you receive a chain-letter, the motive used to convince the receiver to forward the message, is not real. There are a lot of motives used. The most common are:

All of these motives are hoaxes. The viruses do not exist, there's no message that can give you luck, money, fame or happiness and there's no way on this planet, an E-mail message can format your hard drive.

"And what's so bad about all that, anyway?"

Let's make a little simulation....

We have (in order of appearence):

Lamer sends 1 message to Joe.
Joe was convinced to send the message to everyone in his address book, so he sends the message to Joe1, Joe2,.....and Joe10.
Joe1, Joe2,....and Joe10 were also convinved to send the message to everyone in their address book. Now let's make some calculations...

I think you get the picture... Imagine that each of the last 100 receivers, instead of only sending 10 messages send 20 messages each... I'll leave you to do the math...

"Wow, that's a lot of people receiving messages with nothing but fake information!"

That's right. And there are a lot of people that don't like receiving "junk-mail". So, if you receive a hoax or chain-letter by E-mail, don't do what it says, don't forward it to your friends. If you want to forward it to anyone, forward it to me, so I can post it in this page and people know of it.