Diana Wichtel: When in doubt, just don't send it out

There's no end to the creative ways people come up with to torment each other. High on my hit list are telemarketers who somehow know when you're just settling down for a glass of wine and ER. "Good evening, Mrs WickWilch Witchnell, and how are you tonight?". They're only doing a job, so I try to scream quietly.

People who send chain letters have no excuse. What is the thinking here? "I could use a bit of luck. Why don't I send a death threat to six of my closest friends?"

Pass on the letter and you'll be as rich as Bill Gates - well, Paul Holmes maybe - within four days. Brilliant.

The downside? Should you ignore the letter, some ancient gypsy curse kicks in and your friends, in the unlikely event you still have any, will be sending out chain letters of their own, raising money for your on-going medical treatment. If you're lucky.

I've never passed on a chain letter. Not because I'm rational and strong-minded. Ancient gypsy curses terrify me. Only a congenital inability to locate six envelopes, six stamps and a post office has made me a recidivist chain-breaker.

And still they come. I've had the now legendary Craig Shergold letter at least twice over the years. That one wasn't a hoax. A real boy with cancer requested get well cards back in 1989 and it made him an urban legend.

He's long since recovered (See! The chain works!) but it took years for the message to stop sending cards - please - to get out. By then the letter had taken on a life of its own, with various mutations spawning a whole "sick kid hoax" subgroup.

Long before there were computers to have hoax viruses on, chain letters invented the idea. "Thought viruses", they've been called. They infiltrate your mind, mess with it, then go on their evil, self-replicating way. The internet has just made being a social nuisance so much easier.

Sending hoaxes and chain letters, like jamming other peoples email with porn, is considered poor netiquette, but manners have never counted for much in the anonymous reaches of cyberspace. I'm constantly deleting messages ordering me to tell everyone in my address book that Nokia wants to give me a free phone (they don't) or that underarm deodorant gives you cancer (it doesn't).

Well-meaning friends bombard me with computer virus alerts, warning that if I should open an email entitled "It takes guts to say Jesus" or "Cat Colonic" (who could resist?) a nasty virus will erase my hard drive, empty my bank account and drain all the petrol from my car on its way out.

Once these warnings did what they were designed to do. They made me panic. Now I go to websites such as urbanlegend.com or Hoaxbusters and check the suckers out. There's enough garbage orbiting in cyberspace.

Why do people start these things? In the case of the "make money fast" subgroup, the answer is obvious. As for the rest, where the eternal proliferation of a badly spelled bit of text is the only outcome, the sheer scale is its own reward. Cause gridlock in cyberspace! Some saddo can have millions of people nervously emailing each other, possibly long after he or she is dead. Power. Immortality.

But why do so many normally sane people pass this rubbish on? Because it feels good. You're helping a poor, sick child or stopping a deadly virus. You know something no one else, give or take a few million other netizens, knows. It's a way to act directly in a world straight-jacketed by rules and bureaucracy that are increasing with the exponential momentum of an out-of-control chain letter.

And because beneath our thin veneer of civilisation lurks a Stone Age brain. "Four days later he received $7,775,000!!" - good. "Nine days later she died!!" - not so good. The Flesh Eating Banana Bacteria computer virus - very, very bad.

The power of suggestion is strong. Suspicion and superstition flourish in anxious times as we see whenever the anti-immigration crowd starts scaremongering.

Forwarding a chain letter or a virus alert is a less messy way of sacrificing a goat in the hopes of appeasing the gods.

Even when you're on your guard, it's easy to get sucked in. I found myself the other day almost offering to help my daughter to send off a chain letter. It seemed genuine enough, begun by children in 1998 to get into the Guinness Book of Records.

"This is not a chain letter" it promised, but it had all the hallmarks . The hook: "Children started this." The payoff: "It will be published in the Guinness Book of Records who took part." The veiled threat: "The post office is monitoring the letter's progress and will know who broke it." Of course the post office is doing no such thing. A trip to another useful website, www.breakthechain.org, revealed that the letter is a well-known fraud.

The Guinness Book of Records did publish Craig Shergold's record for the most items received in the mail in 1991, but its website advises that the organisation "does not accept any records relating to chain letters sent by post or email. No matter if it says that Guinness World Records and the postal service are involved, they are not."

So I told my daughter, ruthlessly crushing her hopes of chain letter immortality, bin it. But like cockroaches, these things are designed to withstand the end of the world. Pointless, annoying and sometimes downright sinister, they are the sad folklore of our age.

What can we do? As the hoax busters suggest: "When in doubt, don't send it out." But remember to throw a bit of salt over your left shoulder just in case.