I don't know what happened, but chain mail has been clanking into my mailbox more frequently than ever before. Finally, I received a number of copies of a chain mail prank that hoped to result in tons of people sending a copy of the Bill of Rights to President Clinton's email address on the same day. That prank also appeared in some of the Apple Internet lists that Chuq von Rospach runs, and he unsubscribed the person who submitted it from all the lists within minutes of seeing the message, since chain mail is an express violation of the charter of those lists. The second square contains two pennies, the third four, the fourth eight, the fifth sixteen, and so on. I say hypothetical game, because by the last square, you've amassed a vast fortune.
Chain mail has the potential to grow even more quickly.
Many of us have tens of people in our address books, and some people probably have over a hundred people to whom they could send such trash. My impression is that most of the chain mail messages I see have about 25 people in the header, and if that impression is both real and continued at every generation, you can see how chain mail could grow exponentially and significantly slow down delivery of all other mail, as the many mail servers on the Internet struggle to process millions of copies of the same message. I'm sure there are technical solutions to the problem, and if it continues to get worse, someone will implement them, much as people invented cancelbots to cancel spam postings on Usenet. We shouldn't let it get that far though, since chain mail is not a technical problem. It's a societal problem, and by participating in it you allow someone else to exploit you for their purposes.