Chain Mail Curses and Bad Luck

By Dr. Tess Bridges
Risk Management Division, University of London, UK.

Inbox irritation
It’s Monday morning at work. Coffee in hand, you gravitate towards your e-mail inbox, naturally having attended to your intray of urgent jobs first. You see amongst the work-related titles a message from a friend, and you open it up, hoping to discover a pithy summary of the weekend’s more nefarious activities. Instead, much to your disappointment, you find a rather nauseating collection of platitudes or else an image of nastiness (for example, see figure 1).

The e-mail concludes with something like the following sign off: If you send this e-mail off to 50 people within the next five minutes you will gain enlightenment, millions, kittens, if you do not you will get bad luck for the rest of your life.

The principle content differs, though a startling number of these ephemeral e-beasts involve photographs of sunsets with meaningful quotations attached. The number of people you have to send the e-mail to varies, as does the stated time limit. What is consistent is that there’s usually some threat (thinly veiled or otherwise) and thus a slightly uneasy feeling as you press delete.

The question, to discard, or to send on has led some organisations to construct guidelines for dealing with chain mails. Sandy Portincaso, writing for the Christian Science Sentine, suggests chain mail recipients ask themselves the following: “Does it [the e-mail] instruct, awaken…. promote meaningful discussions, lighten burdens, touch the heart, heal? These … keep me from sending items that would clog up someone else’s mailbox or pollute his or her thought.”¹

The American Federal Advice Bureau also offers some reassuring advice: ‘here’s the scoop on chain mail: If it promises any kind of return - like money - it’s fraudulent and illegal!… you could face legal action!'

Perhaps the best piece of advice, taken from an anonymous poem², ‘Shakespeare on Spam’, comments upon the following: “of all conveniences, these are most oft’ meet: The Bulk folder, "Select All," and "Delete"”.

Rationally, we all know that chain mails are an evil combination of kitsch and empty curses, best relegated to the trash. But, could there be any truth in what they say?

Testing the water

The null hypothesis was that there’s no difference in luck engendered by deleting malevolent e-mails. Episodes of ill fortune were counted for a month prior to the study. The number and type of incidents were then compared with outbursts of unluckiness observed after receiving a variety of different chain e-mails, all with curses, again for a period of one month. The substance of each of the chain mails was graded 1-10, where 1 represents a statement almost acceptable by modern standards and 10 represents the manifestation of utter tatt, for example:

‘No one can go back and make a brand new start - anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending...’

Then the severity of the threat was graded, 1 being a mere hopeful wish that the recipient would avail him/herself of the opportunity to revel in fluff, and 10 being eternal damnation. All e-mails were binned after categorisation. Missives from Russians seeking marriage, purveyors of Viagra™ and advertisements for the enlargement of organs not found in 50% of the population were eliminated from the study.

A large supply of comforting foodstuffs such as pistachios, chocolate and tea were stockpiled in accordance with EU directive 345.299b that clearly states ‘no university member of staff should be exposed to overtly cutesy quadrupeds with mournful expressions on an empty stomach.’ A careful record was kept of the time since deleting the message and thus incurring the curse, and also of any particular episodes of bad luck entailed.

The answers: the truth
Regarding the serious question, that is, were any of these threats successful, it seems unlikely; my life circumstances and accumulated misfortunes are summarised in table 1.

Table 1 - comparison of unwanted events during a one month period pre and post e-mail cursing.

A total of 79 chain mails were received within the month. Of these, 21 contained unwanted advice regarding my spiritual development and 14 suggested that I was undervaluing the important people (unspecified) in my life. 12 gave me advice on how to maximise the usefulness of the hours of my day, making the erroneous assumption that I harbour a secret desire to increase my productivity. Five chain mails made the revelation that love was a very important quality and that the world would be a nicer place with more of it, a thought that had not hitherto occurred to me. The rest were incomprehensible. Despite the initial benevolent tone of the mails, 87% of them then took a more sinister tone, ordering me to circulate the material at the risk of incurring some
wrathful misfortune.

An interesting pattern emerged: the more syrupy the principal content of the chain mail was, the darker and more evil natured the following curse was. This is shown on figure 2, where it can be seen that numbers of e-mails carrying saccharine affirmations and dire warnings follow the same pattern of distribution:

Figure 2 - The relationship between initial fluff and the progression to sinisterness in the 79 e-mails collected. Fluff quotient is shown in pink, sinisterness in blue.

The ‘bad luck counts’ were analysed with statistical tests. These showed there was no difference (p = 0.655) between the two counts of observations, and thus the null hypothesis must be accepted. However, it is interesting to note that this researcher was marginally less likely to suffer coco-theft following the e-mails, and rendered slightly more vulnerable to gangsta-sized queue bargers.

Curses and conclusions
It is perhaps a salutary observation that incidences of bad luck are fairly perennial regardless of one’s chain mail status. It is to be hoped that this paper will give readers the confidence to delete at will, and thus maybe, in one distant, virtual inbox in the future, we may be relieved of the horror of chain mails.

However, one of the greatest weaknesses of this research is its failure to attempt to the more serious question: if I had sent one of these chain mails to over 100 people, would I now be employed as Cadbury’s chief taste control officer, married to Johnny Depp, and the proud owner of an Alpha Romeo Spider?

References:
¹. from “Internet Essentials” by Sandy Portincaso, a sidebar article in Volume 102, No. 49 (2000-12-04) of the Christian Science Sentine.
². Taken from www.BreakTheChain.org

Dr. Tess Bridges is an archaeological geneticist and freelance journalist currently based in London.

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