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August 13th, 2002

It’s a Party!

I was looking for a college friend and stumbled upon this old school forward from 1995. His name was one of the many recipients (so was mine) of this supposed experiment by a student to see whether he could “infect” everybody on the Internet with AIDS by forwarding a letter and getting others to as well. This one didn’t boast that you’d get 5 cents back for every person you forwarded it or that you’d have bad luck if you deleted it, it just a simple project: “For a class project, I was wondering if this could be passed on to prove a point. In my human sex class, we learned that if someone has received the HIV disease, and they don’t know about it, they could pass it on to people who they don’t even know.”

Of course, this most likely wasn’t a class project. And if it was, it wasn’t very well thought out (exactly how did this person plan on finding how many people had been “infected”?).

This letter is just one of hundreds (thousands?) included on the International Junk Mail Clearinghouse site. The IJMC has been around since 1995 and pretty much halted in 2001, but may make a comeback at somepoint, according to the front page. Browse through and reminisce about all that crap you used to get (and forward!) when you first got online.

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