Is this Email suspect

[AlanHo]

I have received the following Email - which I will ignore. However - I am curious - is there any possibility it might be genuine. If so - why have they not identified themselves more fully. If it is some kind of scam - what are their motives ?

Quote :

Sent from Gemma Brown.

I recently received a chain letter (A piece of mail that had been forwarded to me) that had your e-mail address in it along with several other peoples.

I thought that as your mail address was on one of these chain letters (forwards) you may have others that you would be willing to send to me. I know that this might sound like a daft request but I can assure you that this is a serious request. I am involved in a university project that is based over a year and we are analysing Internet mail, we are trying to ascertain trends and patterns to come up with some fairly accurate statistics regarding the type of mail that circulates around the internet, we know that 70% of all mail is spam but what we don’t know is what percentage of that spam accounts for chain mail (forwards of any type, something that has been forwarded to you, a piece of mail that has formed part of a chain).

Please send absolutely anything and everything that remotely resembles chain mail, forwards of any type (even the rude ones). My project is based over a year and I need one million forwards for this project to be a success, so please keep them coming and don’t worry I have some pretty huge mail boxes.

I would be grateful if you would be kind enough to forward this piece of mail to all your friends as I need as much help as I can get.

Please send all chain mail (forwards) to the following address. [email protected]

Everyone that helps will receive a copy of our results and findings in January of next year so please help if you can.

Thanks

Gemma

Reference No - (WRGYY3ZS9O3)

You will only receive this mail the once, it will not be sent to you again and your e-mail address will not be passed on, however to conform to the law we must give you the opportunity to have your e-mail removed from our list. Please reply with the word delete to have your address removed.

Unquote.

[nellie2]

Hmmm, it might be genuine but then again it might be a way of collecting live email addresses.

People have a terrible habit of forwarding funnies to their friends, who forward it on etc etc.

No one seems to send these forwards as blind carbon copies and no one seems to bother to edit out previous lists of emails.

Personally... If I send something to my friends then it goes as a blind carbon copy, that way I'm not revealing my friends email addy's to anyone else. But not everyone is as careful as me :(

[-pops-]

There are 24 Googles to the "research-project.org" - most of them indicate it is spam.