Researchers looking for e-mail chain letters

Ever get an e-mail petition asking you to help save NPR or protest the (then-impending) Iraq war? If so, researchers at Cornell University want to know.

Bloggers at NewScientist found this fascinating study on how information—in this case, Internet-based chain letters—spreads from one person to another, and researchers are enlisting our help.

Just search your inboxes for one of two e-mail petitions that have been circulating for the past several years—chances are, you have either one or both of them somewhere.

One of the chain letters, which was first spotted as early as 1997, warns of cutbacks in NPR, PBS, NEA, and other government-funded arts programs, while the other, 2003-era letter seeks signatures to protest the Iraq war.

At first, I thought it was a stretch that I'd have either of these old e-mail petitions—that is, until I found a version of the NPR letter (which my wife, who got the message from her boss, had forwarded to me) in my archive folder, dated 2005. No sign of the Iraq chain letter, however.

Follow this link for details on the two chain letters (and the variants thereof), along with information on who to contact if you find them.

So, what exactly are the Cornell researchers trying to prove? Well, as they put it:

Although information, news, and opinions continuously circulate in the worldwide social network, the actual mechanics of how any single piece of information spreads on a global scale have been a mystery. Here, we trace such information-spreading processes at a person-by-person level using methods to reconstruct the propagation of massively circulated Internet chain letters. We find that rather than fanning out widely, reaching many people in very few steps according to "small-world" principles, the progress of these chain letters proceeds in a narrow but very deep tree-like pattern, continuing for several hundred steps.

So (if I'm following this right), unlike a computer virus, which tends to spread rapidly in a matter of days (or even hours), the flow of information from person to person is slow but steady—very steady, as it turns out, given that the NPR petition (in one form or another) has been floating around the Net for a good 11 years.

Will the study help staunch the flow of span to your inbox? Well, not really—after all, it's always your friends, family and co-workers who pass on chain letters anyway. That said, it's a nifty project, in a Folding@home kind of way.

And just in case you were wondering, check out this interesting story on Snopes (my favorite hoax-busting site) on why e-mail petitions just don't work.