Chain letters

CeCe made me think of this. How often have you had to deal with your "friends" sending you chain e-mail letters? "You've been tagged by the Hug Angel! Forward this email to 10 friends in the next 30 seconds and you will receive a fantastic financial windfall. But if you don't you will meet with great personal tragedy!" Shit like that. I admit, if it's something cute/funny (without the threat of disaster) I'll send it along but usually I'll just hit "reply" and tell the person who sent it, "Thanks for thinking so much of me that you put me in this position to risk cosmic wrath because I don't want to bother anyone else I know with this crap, mother fucker. Oh, and tell mom hugs and kisses from us dad."

Nah. That shit is old. The only time I'd might get one like that is if it's really clever and someone thought I might get a good laugh out of it.

I have been known to ask them "You say you love me, so why have you wished this horrible luck on me?", or "I thought we were friends but you want me to have 10 years bad luck?". I also never send them, except one very funny one that I sent to my uncle who also hated chain letters.

I never forward that shit, just hit delete and forget it. However, some of it is such outrageous urban legend crap that after I Snope it out, will send 'reply to all' so everyone knows it is just a spam hoax.

BTW, apparently not everyone knows how to use a BCC instead of CC. It is a modern courtesy not to expose all your disparate e-mail addressees to someone's wrath whom they don't even know.

Shale wrote:I never forward that shit, just hit delete and forget it.

That's what the people in the movie did too & look what happened.

I rarely get them now, but was actually surprised how many years certain friends of mine forwarded that shit. Professional women forwarding the "do this or you will have bad luck for five years" blew my mind.

I don't even open them I delete them immediately.

Sometimes I read them if I think they have a funny joke. But I never forward them.

Regarding BCC's I have asked people to do this but very few do. I always do.

WOW.. no wonder none of us ever won the lottery lol

I smash chain letters, not merely break them. Friends and acquaintances, and fell mailing list/FB page members who send chain letters make me want to scream. And yes, this includes all the sickly cute pictures, viral jokes, saccharin sweet but phoney friendship rainbow huggy angel stuff. Ugh! Even those viral videos are chain letters. I remember when the Susan Boyle thing was going aroun, and the Il Divo videl link. I got those a few times from different sources, and it was like - argh! Enough already! I made a site for chain-smashing, where the smashes are put. It keeps me from screaming directly at my friends but at least the message is out there for anyone to happen on. The latest fwd I received was called "The Blind Horse" or "Two Horses" and it was a "Chirkcn soup" type story, probably taken from"For The Horse Lover's Soul" for all I know. Bleck. Chain letters are manipulative, and their goal is to be replicated all around the net and back, an infinite number of times. I refuse to play into that scheme.

I also do reply-all with a link debunking the chain letter, and hopefully prevent others who got the obnoxious thing from the forwarder from spreading the chain any further. But sometimes there's the odd idiot who replies back, yelling at me because their email was exposed, and I will tell them to yell at the person who sent the chain letter to both them and me in the first place, I wasn't foolish enough to send a hoax and those addresses were in the forwarder's contact list, not mine. When there doesn't seem to be an entry on any hoax-busting sites concerning the chain letter, I'll just smash it myself and put it up on ChainSmashers. For that matter, even hoaxes that are already debunked on hoax-busting sites, still get smashed on ChainSmashers because they make me so dang ticked off that I must scream and get it out somewhere.

CeCe wrote:
That's what the people in the movie did too & look what happened.

[quote]

"Chain Letter"? from 2010? Oh, boy, that Chain dude has it coming. A friend and I are working on a story to give that guy a serious pwning. That rotten little brat from "The Ring" also gets it in the neck but not in the same story. It seems nobody wants to give the bullies behind the chain letters the thrashing they deserve. Well I'm changing that.

Tony Marino wrote:I don't even open them I delete them immediately.

[quote]

I can't do that, the compulsion to read what it is and then get a debunking link to reply back and set the record straight is too strong. It's not enough to quietly delete, it never stopped the forwards from some people. I often won't reply if I can't find a link to back me up when discouraging chain letters sent to me, I'll just stop writing to these people altogether. That worked with one person, and she eventually got the hint and stopped sending me animal picture chain letters. A different person, I just didn't tell her when my email address had changed. The silent treatment didn't discourage her. Mostly, I'll get a TruthOrFiction or some such link or a few, the more the better, and write a little note to go with the links, explaining this chain letter is inaccurate and why. But I get a lot that can't be found discussed on these sites, so I'll just write out a screaming smash and delete the offending email. Maybe by chance, some of my forwarding friends will come across ChainSmashers and realize just how sending chain letters has hurt their relationship with recipients, a lot of them secretly hate forwards but just can't bring themselves to tell the senders. And I know what it's like getting abandoned by people who would rather go on sending chain letters than be a real friend. Yeah, got a heckload of issues on this subject.

Not so much in email, but good Gawd...one of the things I hate about social networking sites is crap like that. Quite a few of my friends will send hugs and smiles and winks. And if you don't send them back, they'll actually say something about it.

Nhaiyel wrote:Not so much in email, but good Gawd...one of the things I hate about social networking sites is crap like that. Quite a few of my friends will send hugs and smiles and winks. And if you don't send them back, they'll actually say something about it.

[quote]

O heck yes! It used to be email hug-wars, now it's FB "Hug requests!" and chain statuses, the whole junkyard. In fact, someone recently sent me an app request for some kind of hug. I screamed inside my head. I thought I had blocked all my friends' nuisance chain apps, guess not. Urgh! Social networks have become every bit as bad for chain letters as email was in the late 90s. Really maddening. I'll be blocking that app, because just seeing the notify of the request makes my head ache.