I’ve revamped the UI for my Chain Letter Archive.

It’s modeled after an old AOL 4.0 inbox. I used AOL 4.0 with NINA for reference when making it, as well as the 98.css project. Icons are courtesy of svgrepo.com.

Each chain letter is an email inside of the inbox, and clicking them opens up the chain letter in an email message.

The sender list is mostly just inside jokes. I debated adding more inside jokes in, like making the “Reply” and “Reply All” buttons actually do stuff, but I decided to hold back for now.

I actually really like how this turned out. When I did the original revamp last year I kept second guessing myself. You can see the old design below.

In that case I was going for a Geocities-like feel, but I think I missed the mark. The site was ugly and it wasn’t clear that it was done on purpose. Doing bad design right is actually kind of hard.

Anyway, for the new site I actually found an 2 additional chain letters that I had saved on my old geocities website that I hadn’t posted in the archive. So the archive now contains 7 letters. That’s not a lot, but I think one gets the gist for what a chain letter was after reading through a few of these. My original collection was around 10 letters, but over time the ones I didn’t post online got lost.

When I was originally collecting these I was only trying to save the good ones, which were few and far between. And then once the 2000’s hit, it seemed like these kind of letters completely disappeared.

At the time these kind of letters mostly annoyed me, but I found myself getting oddly nostalgic for them when I was putting this together. Anyway, I hope the site can provide some amusement.