Chain email - what's the point?

Ha, what have I created here.
:smiley:

Yes, I meant chain emails, not chain mail as in the armour. The political ones annoy me as much, but at least the motivations are obvious. Very odd that the motivation appears to be amusement for the simple-minded; don’t these people have better things to do?! If they think wasting the time of idiots is fun, TV is gonna blow their freakin’ minds.

Chain email represents a goldmine for email marketers what with all those live addresses in there ripe for the picking. You realize that your email address is worth money.

Seconded (or maybe thirded-- think someone mentioned this above). However, I can’t help but wonder about this when email first got going. There certainly wasn’t the vast quantity of spammers we have now. I imagine that when the first chains were getting passed around (on BBS accounts or the like), it was just because some wankers realized they could get their stupid chain letter passed much more easily than by mail. This probably made them orgasm just by thinking about it.

I blame the wankers.

Chain letters are much older than the internet.

What the hell was the point back when you actually had to write out 20 copies (or whatever) longhand? And pay postage?

Yeah, some guy had a theory about that.

Did you read the second half of the sentence you quoted from me? :smiley:

Yeah, sorry to imply that you were mistaken. I’m betting several of our younger posters don’t have any experience with snail mail chain letters, and that also shows why generating lists of valid email addresses can’t be the sole motivation behind them. I just wanted to make it clear that we’re not dealing with a 21st century technological phenomenon, but a centuries-old sociological one.

It’s OK, I wasn’t offended :). The chain letter from Jesus you linked to was pretty cool.

Actually, come to think of it, one of those crapass young adult horror writers (uhhh… Christopher Pike) wrote a book about people getting killed after receiving a chain letter. I think it was called Chain Letter.