👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully wretched little piece of 21st-century weirdness - "mailserv." Frankly, I haven't seen a weirder thing since I stumbled upon a badger college in Shropshire during a postgraduate field trip.
Basically—and brace yourselves—"mailserv," as it emerged primarily within certain corners of the late 2000s and early 1980, was a very specific kind of…arrangement. It wasn't about sending letters through the postal system (obviously! Where’s your sense, frankly?!). Instead, mailserv meant a deliberate, often obsessive, and deeply unsettling practice whereby individuals would systematically solicitively and then meticulously archive, photograph, scan, copy—basically hoard —every piece of incoming unsolicited junk mail. Letters, envelopes, fliers…the whole wretched lot. They weren't interested in what the mail contained; they were interested in its physical manifestation – the texture of the envelope, the weight of the cream address label, the specific shade of a badly printed advertisement. It was an…obsession with ephemera, really. 90% compulsive, 10% some sort of weird archiving compulsion. Now, the genesis is murky, honestly. Early talk pinned it on certain online BBS and early-days personal FTP, where people were exchanging these bizarre stockpiles as…gifts? Trading posts for oddities? Who even knows what the point was
