09-15-2022, 07:19 PM
Today I checked my personal e-mail account and I found that my "Junk" folder was filled to the brim with the most bland, naive and even offensively lazy attempts at scamming. Incredibly clumsy attempts at hooking me up with "hot girls" or notifications about my "missed Whatsapp voice mails". As I deleted those, I couldn't avoid reminiscing about the spam mails of old, the really elaborate PowerPoint presentations and "choose-your-own-adventure" kind of trash that made it almost desirable to scroll through the dark corners of your inbox.
It is actually quite sad knowing that these will most likely never be a thing again, but some of them got really creative and had a lot of effort put behind them.
I remember getting to see heartwarming stories told through still images and set to the beat of some soft tunes that I can still almost see to this day. I also recall receiving some pretty hilarious pranks promising "new technologies" that were often just lighthearted fun (my favorite being the one that promised you that you could take pictures of yourself without a camera, just by being online... then you would smile as instructed, push the button... and see the image of grinning chimpanzee looking back at you, all to the tune of the humiliating "wa-wa-wa" comedy sound).
We could get a dozen or so of these during the week and they never got old (although the quality varied massively).
Towards the end of this trend, when all the spammers had gone to Social Media, we also used to get some pretty cool, automated "story makers" that would ask you to contribute several keywords to a story and then would make the tale based on what you had typed in (regardless of if it made sense or not). These were usually played for roasting effects and were pretty fun to mess around with, especially once we learned that we could just download the HTML files and mess with them offline.
Finally, we got the ones designed to make you crap your pants (effectively, too). I'm not gonna dwell on those much, but they were made in a way that had you looking really hard at an image, then quickly (and aggressively) replace it with another one, just so you would scream and get away from the screen. I fell really hard with a couple of those.
Absolutely all of those were memorable and massively better than anything I have gotten on the last +10 years. It is a shame that technology has advanced to the point of declawing these (since not everyone would trust the attached files or even have the right tools at hand to run them anymore). But I guess that's part of what made the internet of old such a wild, interesting and weird place to visit.
It is actually quite sad knowing that these will most likely never be a thing again, but some of them got really creative and had a lot of effort put behind them.
I remember getting to see heartwarming stories told through still images and set to the beat of some soft tunes that I can still almost see to this day. I also recall receiving some pretty hilarious pranks promising "new technologies" that were often just lighthearted fun (my favorite being the one that promised you that you could take pictures of yourself without a camera, just by being online... then you would smile as instructed, push the button... and see the image of grinning chimpanzee looking back at you, all to the tune of the humiliating "wa-wa-wa" comedy sound).
We could get a dozen or so of these during the week and they never got old (although the quality varied massively).
Towards the end of this trend, when all the spammers had gone to Social Media, we also used to get some pretty cool, automated "story makers" that would ask you to contribute several keywords to a story and then would make the tale based on what you had typed in (regardless of if it made sense or not). These were usually played for roasting effects and were pretty fun to mess around with, especially once we learned that we could just download the HTML files and mess with them offline.
Finally, we got the ones designed to make you crap your pants (effectively, too). I'm not gonna dwell on those much, but they were made in a way that had you looking really hard at an image, then quickly (and aggressively) replace it with another one, just so you would scream and get away from the screen. I fell really hard with a couple of those.
Absolutely all of those were memorable and massively better than anything I have gotten on the last +10 years. It is a shame that technology has advanced to the point of declawing these (since not everyone would trust the attached files or even have the right tools at hand to run them anymore). But I guess that's part of what made the internet of old such a wild, interesting and weird place to visit.
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