#she probably joined gmail beta in the very beginning in 2004-2005

[sonicenvy]

ok so, like in all seriousness, I need any and all of the children™ following me to know this about the internet in days of yore. So like a major precursor to scrolling through dumb posts on social media sites was chain emails. This was a formative part of my early internet social experience™.

Basically someone you were friends with sent you an email with a subject line that was something like FWD: FWD: Silly Dogs. This email almost always originated from some other person that you did not know that was sometimes even located in a different country than you. It spread like MLMs (Multi-Level Marketing Schemes) wish they could spread. The originator of the email would have sent it on blast to everyone in their address book, and many, many, many people who received it (and enjoyed the content) forwarded it everyone in their address books. Sometimes people added comments onto it. You could see the entire FWD chain, which included the email addresses of basically everyone who'd ever received this email before you. This included, again, many people that you did not know.

Some chain emails were the classic dumb "FWD this email to 10 people for xyz good thing to happen to you" or "FWD this email to 10 people in your address book or xyz bad thing will happen to you." Some of these emails were literally just a collection of funny, interesting, informative, or downright weird pictures with no sources. Some of them were "games" where you'd add something to the email chain that built on whatever the person who forwarded it to you built. Many of these emails have very similar formats to modern "reblog this post and say xyz in the tags," or "reblog this post for good luck," posts.

Here are some screenshots of one such email that I received in 2009, to give you an idea of this:

There would be, sometimes like 100+ email address blocks like the below before the actual email even started....

The above email contained 15 silly dog pictures btw. also, as was sometimes typical of such an email the end part of the email would have weird links to people's company websites that they had in their default email signatures. sometimes they had telephone #s too. Sometimes the bottom of the email just straight up had an advertising link for some kind of service that was attached to the originator's (or someone else in the chain's) email account provider because they had a free email account instead of one that they paid for. The internet was a very different place back then y'all....

As a sidenote, you used to have to PAY to have an email address with good features. When gmail beta came out in 2004 it changed the email game. It was pretty exclusive in the beginning so not a lot of people had it. By the time I got my invite and joined gmail beta 2008 it was almost to full release. That said, I didn't really start using my gmail until 2011 though because gmail still had, uh, issues at the time. Also because of the fact that I was still heavily into yahoo IM and like, yahoo answers. My email address before my gmail was an email address that my mom had bought for me when i was, like a toddler in 1999 with her dial-up internet service. I'm not sure why she bought all her VERY little kids email addresses they absolutely wouldn't be using for a few more years but there you have it. I sent my first email in 2004, which was, like fucking 20 years ago lmao. thinking today about how my first ever emails are older than a lot of kids on this site now.... fucked up because I'm not quite yet 30, so I'm like "don't let that be THAT fucking long ago..."

So yeah, uh, that's your internet history lesson for today kids.