Fun_People Archive
16 Dec
Houghton Mifflin & Books for Children's Hospitals

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 96 22:03:50 -0800
To: Fun_People
Subject: Houghton Mifflin & Books for Children's Hospitals

Fun_Persons:

    Recently I've received a number of e-messages like the following:

>     Houghton Mifflin Publishing Corporation will donate one book to a
> children's hospital for every 25 e-mails they receive.  Please e-mail them
> at:
> 			share@hmco.com.
>
>     In the spirit of the season, please take a second and pass this along.
> I hope you can spare the seconds...and let your friends know.  So far they
> have only received 3,400 messages.  Last year they reached 23,000.
>
> Many thanks and happy holidays!

    This is the kind of thing that often turns out to be Urban Legend at  
best and Malicious Spam at worst.  So I wrote to "postmaster@hmco.com" to ask  
if this promotion was for real.  Here's the reply...

> From: Will Howarth <howartw@hmco.com>
> To: Peter Langston <psl@acm.org>
> Subject: Re: A question about share@hmco.com
>
> The campaign was legit, and the goal of 50,000 messages was reached.  At
> this time the campaign is complete, and if you could encourage people not
> to send additional mail to share@hmco.com it would be most helpful.
>
> Unfortunately our marketing folks overestimated the capabilities of our
> mail exchangers, making this a very difficult campaign to keep up with.
> Additional future campaign's will not involve email, probably a html form.
>
> Thanks for your concern however, as at times, the campaign did resemble a
> mail bomb attack....
>
>	  ###############################################
>        #	Will Howarth		 	       #	
>       #	Systems Engineer	 	      #	
>      #	Houghton Mifflin Publishing Co.	     #	
>     #		222 Berkeley St.		    #	
>    #		Boston, MA 02152	 	   #	
>   #		(617)351-5886			  #
>  #		howarth@hmco.com		 #
> ###############################################
>

    So we can feel good that although they got swamped they asked for it.   
And they've probably learned all they're going to, so we can just let it  
die...

Peter
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