Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 13:25:17 -0500 (EST)
From: Donald Watrous <watrous@cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Re: Fw: You can be a part of a child's education

Here's what I tried to reply:

   Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 13:17:32 -0500 (EST)
   From: Donald Watrous <watrous@cs.rutgers.edu>
   To: thirdgradeclass@yahoo.com
   Subject: Re: Fw: You can be a part of a child's education

      >Subject: You can be a part of a child's education
      >
      >
      >>
      >>Please take a minute to respond to this third grade class's email
      >>experiment.
      >>
      >>Hello Everybody,
      >>    We are a third grade class in Seattle, Washington.  We have 7 boys
      >>and 8 girls in our class.  We are doing a class project to see how
      >>many people, and how far, our e-mail can reach.  Our project
      >>started on February 22 and will end on April 22.  Please just e-mail us
      >>and tell us where you are and send this letter to as many people as
      >>you can.  Our address is thirdgradeclass@yahoo.com
      >>
      >>      Thank you,
      >>               Mrs.. Boivins Class
      >>>

   Greetings from Piscataway, New Jersey.  I received a copy of your
   letter from a friend of mine in Thailand.

   I'm sorry to say that I will not forward your message to anyone.  Your
   request that I send the letter to as many people as I can amounts to
   making it a chain letter.  I have a policy of never forwarding chain
   letters.  In fact, I have a web site on chain letters at

	    http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/chain-letters.html

   Please visit it and let me know what you think.

   I suspect that by now you have been overwhelmed by the responses to
   your request.  It was wise of you to put a time limit within your
   message, but you probably should have included the year also.

   If you write up a report on the results of your experiment, I'd like
   to see a copy so I can include it or a pointer to it on my chain
   letter web page.

   Good luck in your education!

And here's what I got back:

       ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
    thirdgradeclass@yahoo.com

       ----- Transcript of session follows -----
    ... while talking to mta-x1.yahoomail.com.:
    >>> DATA
    <<< 551 qdirdel error 100:User is over the quota.  You can try again later.
    554 thirdgradeclass@yahoo.com... Service unavailable

Yup, they were overwhelmed.  They're probably getting mail as fast as
they can read it.   ;^)

Don