Here's what happens with those silly e-mail science fair projects.

Kelly


The Wall Street Journal

February 13, 2003


    Girl's E-Mail Request Clogs Up In-Box With 160,487 Responses

    By JUNE KRONHOLZ

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

    So you think you've got mail:

    On Jan. 13, Shannon Syfrett, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Central
Academy in Macon, Miss., launched a chain letter over the Internet.
E-mail chains that seek responses from around the world are the latest
rage in science-fair projects, as kids set out to learn where and how
fast information travels. Shannon called her project
"[log in to unmask]," and she expected that in six weeks she
"might get 2,000 or 3,000" replies to her note asking people to write
back and then pass her message along.

    That was her first miscalculation.

    The next day, Jan. 14, the request she had sent to 23 people
generated 200 e-mail replies, an average of one every 7.2 minutes. By
Jan. 16, messages had arrived from 47 states and 25 countries, including
Australia and Zimbabwe. There were 8,768 e-mails on Jan. 24, and another
12,013 three days later. They were now arriving one every 7.2 seconds.

    Overwhelmed and sick with the flu, Shannon shut down her screen name
for 2 1/2 days, but 9,455 e-mails flooded in when she reopened it on
Jan. 31, her log shows. Messages from Libya and Iran popped up on Feb.
2. On Feb. 4, Shannon and her parents emptied the electronic mailbox 35
times -- it holds 1,000 incoming messages -- but still, a man telephoned
from France to complain that he couldn't get his e-mail through. On Feb.
5, there were another 37,854 e-mails, one every 2.3 seconds. Shannon
pulled the plug, 17 days early. Altogether, she had received 160,478
e-mails from 189 countries and 50 states. [image]

    "It's over," she sighed in an interview that night. Which is when
Shannon Syfrett made her second miscalculation.

    It was just a matter of time before school projects and chain
letters would meet on the Internet, and a matter of only a little more
time before it became clear what a headache they could become. Shannon's
first e-mail reply arrived two hours after she launched her chain; her
first overseas message came 11 hours after that, from
Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

    In a wired, message-always-waiting world, e-mail now reaches the
remotest coordinates on the globe. It reached Floyd, a maintenance
supervisor at the South Pole ("90 degrees south, bottom of the world!"),
and it reached Doug on an icebound ship in the Bering Sea ("latitude
W55.23, N170.34 ... waiting for the thaw.").

    John Krueger, a Lutheran minister in Tempe, Ariz., who says he
doesn't know Shannon, answered her e-mail and sent it along to Chad
Montabon. He is teaching English in Vietnam but picked the message up
while he was in Thailand and forwarded it to a friend nicknamed
Muskratking in Antarctica. Anita Morley, who runs an orphanage in Ulan
Bator, Mongolia, says she answered the note after she received it from
Linda Paulus, a missionary in Papua New Guinea, who says she got it from
her niece in Ohio.

    John Carr, who is helping build a containment structure around the
Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, answered Shannon after he says
he got the message from Richard Hopp, a retired engineer in Florida, who
says he also forwarded it to a pal in Venezuela after it was forwarded
to him from his daughter at Mississippi State University. A Marine
somewhere near Iraq ("no city, no state"); an Air Force sergeant on the
Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, a staging area for any Middle East
war; and sailors on 17 U.S. Navy ships sent e-mails. One, aboard the USS
Harry S. Truman, added poignantly: "If it's not too much to ask, please
pray for [me]."

    But the speed and sweep of e-mail also mean that a chain can quickly
get out of hand. Two years ago, Taylorsville Elementary School in
Taylorsville, N.C., was flooded with more than 500,000 responses to its
chain. "We couldn't deal with it," says Carol Austin, the school
secretary. A Web site named snopes.com ( www.snopes.com), which tracks
urban legends and e-mail hoaxes, lists chains launched by schools in
Illinois, Los Angeles, New Zealand and Canada that were cut short
because of a deluge of responses. "Folks keep trying, though," the Web
site adds.

    By the last day of Shannon's project, her AOL mailbox was filling up
every 29 minutes -- a minute faster than her computer could empty it. "I
come home at 3:00 and get on the computer and stay on till supper and
have a supper break and go back to the computer until I go to bed," she
said. While she was at school, her mother, Becky, a self-taught computer
teacher, downloaded e-mails, set up spreadsheets, and designed a Web
site to report the results. Between the two of them, they read every
message, Mrs. Syfrett said, but by Feb. 5, "I just couldn't keep up."

    The other problem with e-mail chains is that they're hard to end.
Shannon closed down her e-mail address, but that doesn't mean people
will stop sending replies, creating what America Online Inc. says is "a
systems-resource issue." The e-mail that launched Shannon's chain letter
didn't identify her city or state. But people have found her phone
number anyway, and last weekend were calling to report that their
e-mails had been returned.

    The computer industry takes a dim view of all this. Vincent Weafer,
director of security response at Symantec Corp., which makes
Internet-security software and equipment, says the only difference
between a chain e-mail and a computer virus "is intent." A virus, he
adds, will die out in a few months as it hits security screens, "but
chain letters can live eternally." AOL likens chains to something almost
as insidious: "One person's innocent letter is going to be another
person's spam," says spokesman Nicholas Graham. Shannon used an AOL
account for her project; had she contacted the company first, "we would
have advised her against it," Mr. Graham adds.

    Still, for a teenager who has been out of Mississippi just once, the
project opened the world to her, Shannon said: "I just didn't know how
nice these people were." There was the message from Yvonne in Tallberg,
Sweden, who wrote that it was "too cold for the reindeers to go out." A
farmer in California's Central Valley sent news of a new dairy with
25,000 cows. A Filipino Elvis impersonator wrote from North Carolina,
and Jimmy, a fellow Mississippian, replied from a drilling rig in the
Arabian Gulf. "E-mail comes fast, but Jesus will travel faster when you
ask him into your heart," advised Tom, a missionary in Guatemala. A
Forestville, Calif., grandmother reported that she's building a top
story on her house and will move upstairs when the nearby Russian River
floods again.

    Shannon said she'll now produce "a bunch of charts" to detail how
fast the replies came, design a poster-board display to show where they
came from, and send her results to everyone who, in their e-mails to
her, asked for them.

    The science fair is Feb. 27 in the Central Academy gym. Science
teacher Ellen Williams says the public is invited.

    Write to June Kronholz at

[log in to unmask]

    Updated February 13, 2003


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