The Marine Corps has banned any transfers of chain e-mails, the junk electronic transmissions that urge recipients to forward them to numerous other recipients. Besides branding such e-mails as security risks or unscrupulous sales promotions, MARADMIN 0686/09 also identifies them as wastes of time and consumers of computer server space. "Forwarding chain e-mail distracts recipients from their work, degrades network performance by transmitting non-productive messages, is considered to be a denial of service threat … and causes unnecessary cost," the announcement stated. Marines should delete all chain e-mail transmissions as soon as they get them, and report suspicious ones to their chain of command.
