I hate chain letters, especially the ones that curse me with withered penis if I fail to promptly send it off to 420 friends.
So to get the point across (because asking them to stop NEVER works) I hit the **Reply All ** button and send back this gem of a chain letter. Now, I can’t help but feel that this is somewhat humiliating but it stops the chain mail and you can’t argue with results!
How do you deal with friends who send irritating chain mail?
I prefer plate mail, myself.
Well, I think that link is a bit harsh. Generally I just delete or, if appropriate, reply with a Snopes.com link.
I’m sorry, from the title, totally thought, This guy has someone sending him medieval armor? LOL!
Umm, the first word in that link should be lose, not loose. That is unless the money you are talking about isn’t very tight.
And yes, it’s rude to humiliate anyone. But you, if it made you feel better and all, whatever. 
well, yeah. it’s not good to humiliate anyone.
how do i deal with chain mail? i send them an email telling them not to send it, or i ignore it. the ultimate weapon is sending their email to the spam folder. if they ask why you never respond to the real emails, tell them it’s because they sent too many chain letters and didn’t want to reply to them.
…or you could just ask them to cut it out.
however, if they do keep sending you the emails…and you don’t send it to spam and you don’t do any of this, well, then you get what you deserve. then again, it’s not incredibly hard to just delete them…although i’d rather not get them at all.
homeskillet, your linked letter is a tad harsh IMO. There was one I received years ago when i had an AOL account that cracked me up and gets the same point across an slightly gentler fashion.
A quick Google turned it up. “Reply-to-All” with this:
You too can shit nickels by pissing people off!
And no, you are not being rude by humiliating a chain e-mail forwarder. They are being rude by forwarding it.
Just yesterday, someone at my work who should know better at this point sent an e-mail to 200 people to let us know that “Penny Brown” was missing. This e-mail has been floating around the internet for 5 years now, according to some sources that it only took a quarter-second for Google to turn up.
The e-mail was 45K in size. Sending it to 200 people made it take up 9MB. In addition, the picture of the supposed missing girl that appears in the e-mail was linked from a marketing server, which means a request had to be sent every time the e-mail was opened, which not only tied up network resources, but also sent the IP address, and possibly the e-mail address from Outlook to this server. Now the marketers responsible have a list of legitimate, active IP addresses and possibly e-mail addresses. How nice!
Every e-mail takes storage and transmission resources. The more people use these resources to transmit horseshit that they could quickly have verified as such, the more resources must be brought to bear, and the more everyone’s cost to use the internet goes up, either in terms of actual fees, or greater intrusion by advertising.
Treat every spam and chain letter as money leaving your pocket, and treat the senders accordingly.
I got one of these damned things just yesterday. From a relative! It was sent to me knowing my distaste for such things. The relative seemed to feel that the person making the request to “send this along to 12 others” had “good intentions” and that the clogging of email boxes was a good thing to do. The relative felt I could spend the time to address this already-loaded glurge to 12 people I have some respect for and try to avoid offending.
I just cussed the relative for being so stupid and deleted the thing. I sincerely hope the original person making the request gets whatever she was hoping for, and that I don’t shrivel up and die from breaking the chain.
Other than that, fuck it.
The only chain mail that bugs me is when work colleagues send round a virus warning and entitle it ‘Urgent - read this virus warning!!!’
Of course it’s always a hoax found on scopes.com (as ivylass said).
So I send them back the news (politely - one has to work with these gullible people).
I usually just delete the things. When I get sufficiently annoyed with something sent, I let the sender know – especially if it’s an urban legend that goes on, and on, and on … But I wouldn’t hit “Reply All.”
Rude? Perhaps. Necessary? Absolutely. By humiliating them, you are taking action against spam and doing the world a favor.
I’ve responded with Reply All a couple of times, but it was for the stupid, hateful, racist, misogynistic, homophobic stuff my brother-in-law kept sending. I hope he was embarrassed, and maybe it was rude, but I don’t care. He’s a jerk.
With friends who send the more good-natured stuff that they think is cute or sweet, I just reply to the friend and tell them that chain will stop with me, because I don’t do chain letters.
I’ve been sending that very same chain email in response to chain emails I receive for a couple of years now. I’m happy to hear I’m not the only one!
I send it as a joke, it’s usually recieved as a joke, and I never get chains from them again.
Recently, after sending that out, I got a reply saying they were sorry to have bothered me, they thought they were being funny in sending out a chain, and apparently they got it horribly wrong. I just replied and said I took it as a joke and thought you’d take this as a joke. Apparently I was horribly wrong… :rolleyes:
DARN YOOOOOOUU!
Beat me to it.
< sulks >
One good friend of mine sends me all sorts of chain emails - she’s a good friend, though, and I usually just ignore and delete them. The ones that really irk me, though, are the ones co-workers send out. On the network at work. About a month ago, someone sent out a virus warning to everyone. Then people started replying - not checking to see if they were replying to the original sender or to “reply all” and the servers at work were flooded. The higher-ups ended up sending out a notice to everyone reminding them that it’s against the rules (LOL) to send out chain mail at work, and against the rules to send out something to the entire agency. It was actually a bit more threatening than that, but you get the idea. Unfortunately, there are people within my own office who continue to forward chain emails at work. Those I ignore and delete.
Just about everyone I correspond with regularly is an internet-savvy 20-something, so I rarely get chain letters. If it happened often enough to bug me, I’d just tell them one-on-one why chain letters are bad and ask them to issue a retraction so that others didn’t spread it on any further.
I don’t think publicly humiliating the person is called for. In most cases, they aren’t intentionally trying to be a jerk. They’re just misinformed.
The more you make someone feel stupid for having made a mistake, the more stubborn they are likely to become about admitting it was a mistake. So, I think it’s better to try to be patient with someone who is clueless rather than malicious.
That’s what I do. The “gem” is rude, sophomoric and unfunny. It might get results, but merely asking the sender to remove you from their mass mailings would have the same effect without being a juvenile ass.
Only three people occasionally send me chain mail and glurgy stuff. I know all three in real life. One, a sweet old guy, retired chemistry professor and new to computing. He thanked me for the Snopes link and I don’t get dumb stuff from him anymore, though he still sends cute jokes.
A little old lady in her 70s; a friend’s neigbor. Not too bright, somewhat naive about computers. She gave me a big box of home made cookies at Christmas. And a co-worker, really nice lady who tends to send the glurgy “friends” and angel" type emails.
No way would I send these people something stupid and rude, that’s no better than chain emails.
Why not? Maybe you need to hone your communication skills. I can’t imagine any of my friends not honoring a request like this.
I have shown people how to use the BCC feature, so all the addresses don’t show up. Many people newer to computing don’t know how it works.
Actually, I have had people stop sending me chain e-mails after I’ve asked them to. Of course, last time I had a bit of timing on my side. You see, a coworker decided to forward a chain e-mail to me for the first time, one telling me monetary blessings were on the way and all I needed to do was forward it to 10 other people. I received it the morning after I learned I’d be receiving an inheritance from my grandmother who’d died shortly before. :eek:
Come to think of it, I’ve probably got just such an e-mail sitting in my inbox right now. I’ve got a friend who only e-mails me when she forwards me stuff. The last time, it was an urban legend, albeit a partially true one, but unduly hysterical. I sent her a link to the story on Snopes and didn’t hear anything back from her, nor has she mentioned it since, even though we’ve seen each other since then.
My usual response to chain e-mails is to ask that people not send them to me. I’ll send a link to Snopes if I get an e-mail which is an urban legend, and I’ll laugh at the funny ones. I admit I’m miles behind on my e-mail correspondence, but I’ve never understood people who only e-mail me when they’re forwarding stuff.
CJ
Boy, I wish I had phrased my OP a little more carefully. As far as hoax chain mail is concerned, I usually just reply back with a Snopes link as well. The sappy drivel chains, I just delete. Those I have tolerance for, even though they’re still annoying. What I’m talking about are the chain letters that tell me I must do something or face dire consequences. That’s what warrants a little humiliation.
Yes, the response is harsh and sophomoric, it’s Dennis Leary, what do you expect? You might not find it funny, but it makes the point. It might be rude, but how is it any ruder than having someone send you curse via email?
Bonobo, there’s nothing wrong with my communication skills, but thanks for assuming it must be my fault. I’ve never had any difficulty writing, “Please, don’t ever send me threatening chain letters.” What some people do have a problem with is; remembering this, taking the request seriously, or remembering that I’m included in that group list when they forward it on. What they do remember, is feeling slightly embarrassed that such a response was sent because of them. It’s not malicious, and it’s never been taken as such, but it has gotten them to take notice and not send any more.
It depends. My aunt? What could I say to her, she’d never get it.
Coworkers within the same office I just go over there and tell them. I like them, we get along, and they usually hate them too, and only forward them if there is something funny in the beginning.
Coworkers not in the same office I ask them to please relegate my work e-mail to work stuff only. And yes, this includes everything. I don’t differentiate and let them send funnies while not chain letters.
Friends? As others have said, most of my friends are my age and Internet-savvy and don’t send them.
Slight hijack:
I lost a friendship once over this, although maybe it wasn’t worth keeping. Post 9-11 - and I mean a few weeks after - a Muslim friend began sending me all kinds of pro-Muslim stuff. I put up with him sending it. I put up with him stopping the regular correspondence. I even put up with him saying the US had brought it on, and that we deserved it, because he’s entitled to his opinon. But when he started saying how the individual people that died deserved it, and the kids didn’t have any leg to stand on about their parents dying because parents die all over the world, that was it for me. I know parents die all over the world. That doesn’t somehow make one set of parents dying “OK” in my book. Anyway, I said something, and told him to take me off his mailing list. Not only did I get that, he blocked me off his e-mail and I never got another letter from him again. WTF? You can’t take any criticism whatsoever?
