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From: jcSerre@teaser.X.fr (JCS)
Subject: Re: A question about sigs
Date: 1997/08/22
Message-ID: <33fc70eb.60610443@news.teaser.fr>#1/1
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References: <33F4BC94.3E76@reincarnate.com>
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Organization: Guest of France-Teaser
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art


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On Thu, 21 Aug 1997 08:28:14 -0400, Michael Naylor wrote:
>
>> CJ wrote:
>
>> > I have a question that I hope someone will answer.
>> >
>> > I recently got 2 really nice ASCII things in my email, both without
>> > SIGs. One is a very nice flower, and I was asked to send it on to
>> > 5 people as a kind gesture. The other one looks like a leprechaun,
>> > and I was asked to send it out as a good luck charm. I've email both
>> > people with a request for SIGs, but they don't know who made them, just
>> > got them the same way they sent them to me.
>> >
>
>Veronica Karlsson wrote:
>
>> That sounds like a particularly irritating form of chain mail. When I
>> get something like that I usually send it back to whoever sent it to me
>
>Well, there is a big difference between a "Send each of these people $1 
>and post to 200 newsgroups" and "Here's a nice thought and happy 
>picture, send it to five of your friends".
>
>If you get one of these pleasant chain letters, go ahead and send it to 
>your friends.  Never send to strangers, you might send it to Veronica by 
>mistake!  ;)

Michael,

Sorry for the intrusion, but a very few mathematics.

Let's assume very "low" hypothesis about that remail thing:

- Out of the 5 mailed persons, only 2 will bother to followup.
- An average delay of 3 days between receiving and remailing.

So, the number of remailers doubles each 3 days.

After three month, how many people would be about to remail it?

2 ^ (90/3) = 2 ^ 30 = 1,073,741,824

Yes, one billion people -- in theory, there isn't so much people on the
Net.

And even with lower hypothesis, the exponential nature of the thing would
make its explodes to such values in about a year.

IMHO, the World Wild Wait is slow enough yet with saturated transatlantic
backbones, multimedia files downloads, spams and bulk mails, without adding
junk remailing into the whole mess...

JCS
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