“Hello, my name is Timothy Flyte. I have severe ostriopliosis of the liver. (My liver is extremely inflamed). Modern science has yet to find a cure. Valley Childrens hospital has agreed to donate 7 cents to the National Diesese Society for every name on this letter.”

Poor Timmy! By the time I received his email, it had been forwarded 35 times, each time to a list of from one to 50 names. It was 68K -- the equivalent of a 50-page routing slip attached to a postcard. There must be a thousand names here! That’s $70, almost enough to pay for three square hospital meals! I must get this letter back to Valley Childrens hospital, but fast! I scrolled to the first address on the list and sent a note.

“Dear Hotkisss: Are you Timothy Flyte? If so, will you please forward the hospital email address? If not, will you please tell me who sent you the letter?” Hotkisss replied that he/she was just another link in the chain and had no record of where the letter came from.

One guy said he spent five hours collecting addresses and forwarding the note. “If you’re too @#$% selfish to forward this to EVERYONE,” he wrote, “you’re one sick puppy.” Surely he knows what’s up. I sent him a query and received this response: “It’s a chain letter! Get a life!” -- sage advice from someone who claims to spend five hours proliferating a hoax.

A couple of days later, I received another email, this one entitled, “THIS IS SERIOUS: do not delete!” In this episode, a young girl has lung cancer, the result of second-hand smoke. The American Cancer Society is allegedly donating 6 cents per name. Aha! A disease I can spell, and an organization I can identify! I visited the American Cancer Society website (http://www.cancer.org/). There, I find a page entitled, “Unauthorized Chain Letter.”

It seems someone made a cute ascii-character drawing of Tickle-Me Elmo and attached it to the saga of Jessica Mydek, who has a rare case of cerebral carcinoma. The email claims that the ACS will make a donation for every person who receives the letter. Unfortunately, the American Cancer Society cannot locate little Miss Mydek, has no way of knowing how many people receive the letter, and does not plan to donate any amount of money to itself based on that number.

ACS applauds the demonstration of concern represented by those huge forwarding lists, but they flatly state, “No fundraising efforts are being made by the American Cancer Society using chain letters of any kind.”

I was in a large corporation plagued by chain mail and email about Craig Shergold, a child whose dying wish was to receive a record number of postcards. I and a few thousand coworkers received the note many years after Craig had made the Guinness Book of World Records with 16 million postcards.

Make-A-Wish Foundation, which had nothing to do with Craig’s request, reports on its website (http://www.wish.org/) that Craig survived brain surgery in 1991 and has fully recovered. Today, he has his own trash dumpster to haul off the cards, and Make-A-Wish Foundation has an 800 number to handle all the calls about a wish it was never party to. Another child, Ryan McGee, was cursed with rumors of the same wish. Now, thousands of people send unsolicited mail, call and drop by uninvited. Ryan’s real wish includes a plea for strangers to stop hassling his family with letters, visits and phone calls.

A common chain-letter salutation is, “What goes around comes around.” I hope that’s true. I hope people who create fraudulent chain email miss the job of a lifetime because their emailbox is too full to receive the offer. I hope they spend many desperate hours on a project that benefits no one.

Am I cold? Please don’t think that. Miss Mydek and Mr. Flyte, if they even exist, will never see a penny from our email efforts. Craig is cured. Ryan wants us to stop sharing his home address. For every cold prankster who creates fraudulent chain mail, there are thousands of people who respond in an honest effort to be helpful. I salute those people. I hope the time they save by trashing chain email frees them to help real people.

jt used to ramble on like this about once a week in WeekDay newspaper. Nowdays, he just lets em drift across the net and hopes someone will read em. In real life, he's an Internet consultant and web page designer.

jt thinks nobody reads this stuff. Prove him wrong with a note to jt@bootup.com.

Thanks!