We all get these annoying chain letters that doom us with bad luck if we don’t keep the letter moving. We get the same email many times because it seems that all our friends remember us with a simple forwarded message.

I really don’t mind much when the message is nice and sometimes brings a smile or a good laugh; however; some of these messages are becoming really annoying and those who initiate them try to make the reader feel a bit guilty if he/she cuts the chain and stops it in its tracks.

For example; I get these letters with nice Islamic messages, but at the end of the message, I find a disguised threat that says: if you are too good to read and pass this message, maybe you are not worthy of the awards that you will gain if you do!

Sometimes these messages are nothing more than a hoax email that spreads like fire in hay, and usually these kinds of messages are about famous characters or companies or just plain urban legends that hold no objective whatsoever; you scroll down the piles and piles of email addresses that are included from previous forward processes, and when you finally reach the end of the letter, it is a small message that dooms your with bad fortune and loss of all your life luck if you stop this letter from reaching the world.

It always amazed me how some people find the time and energy to create and start such chain letters; where do they get the material from? I am not talking about those who forward, I am talking about those who create and initiate.

The web is a wide source that can give information and images about almost anything, and with the new emerging technologies; you can find clips and send it to your friends list and so on.

We have seen groups created on MSN, Yahoo and others, and we have been sent many letters that were originally created by group administrators with an invitation to join at the end of the letter. I have to admit that some of these messages have good content but some others are just a pure waste of time.

When blogging picked up in our part of the world, we have seen fellow bloggers fall in the trap of “copy and paste”; they used to copy the content of these email letters and paste it in a post on their blogs. We have talked a lot about such bloggers and advised others that for your blog to be genuine; you have to stay away from the “copy and paste” trap.

What is happening now is the complete opposite; the chain letters creators have found a rich material in blogs; and I am receiving chain letters with content I have already seen and know that one of my fellow bloggers has actually written that.

Last night, as I was checking my email; I got an email that has images I have seen on Sabbah’s blog. Another email contains the poem that Mysterious Eve wrote for the child Ahmad who died in the Israeli aggression last week, and as if that is not enough; I get the same poem but translated to English. Another time; I got an email with many pictures taken from Talasim and they still hold the logo.

Where is the respect for people who come up with these posts? Why don’t people respect copyrights and get permission from authors before they steal their material? This is stealing and I don’t think that it can be called something else.

Maybe it is time for those emailers to step aside and have mercy on our inboxes that become full because of these forwarded letters that have content we have already seen on blogs and by their own original authors; will you please stop the redundancy and give us a break?

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