Fan mail is mail sent to a public figure, especially a celebrity, by their admirers or "fans". In return for a fan's support and admiration, public figures may send an autographed poster, photo, reply letter, or note thanking their fans for their encouragement, gifts, and support. Fan mail sent to public figures can be through postal mail, email, social media, and other platforms that allow fans and users to communicate with their favorite public figures.
Fan mail may be in the form of letters, cards, artwork, gifts, comments on social media accounts, and so on. People often send fan mail to various public entertainers, figures such as politicians, athletes, actors, artists, writers, singers, bands, coaches of sports teams, bloggers, and social media stars seem to be the main target. Responses can take a great deal of time to come or never come at all. Since a major celebrity or public figure may receive thousands of pieces of fan mail every day, it is usually impossible for him/her to reply to or read them all and as a result his/her management team, often has the duty of canvassing the incoming mail. [2] However, celebrities such as Tim Allen or Taylor Swift sometimes respond to fan mail. Directly after the 2001 anthrax attacks, some studios and agencies have refused to further take fan mail for safety and security reasons, and have referred fans to alternate forms of contact. [3]
This gimmick has also been used with fictional characters; special episodes of Beavis and Butt-head featured episodes with mail sent to the two characters and the Homestar Runner website regularly features emails sent to and answered by the cartoon's main antagonist, Strong Bad. Public reading and answering of fan mail was a common recurring element of the cult television program Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the TechTV/G4 game review program X-Play often featured hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb answering fan mail at the end of episodes, often in a scornful and satirical manner due to respondents deeply disagreeing with the show's video game reviews. TLC's third studio album was named FanMail , and was a tribute to fans, with the names of many fans that had sent them fan mail over the years included in the album's insert.
In Puerto Rico, popular television children's show host, the Spaniard Pacheco was known for personally reading fan-mails, which usually in his case included drawings by children dedicated to him, on his weekdays television show Cine Recreo. [4]
Many fan mail responses started off as autographed photos but have slowly evolved to communication through social media. Many celebrities and public figures, such as Taylor Swift and J. K. Rowling have been known to respond to fans, and sometimes haters, through Tumblr and Twitter. There have been many occasions in which J. K. Rowling has interacted with fans through her Twitter account. [5] Taylor Swift has also been known to go out of her way to respond to her fans and admirers and even send fans gift packages, a form of fan mail, to selected fans who she had learned about through their social media accounts. [6] While some public figures have responded to fans via social media, it is often known that responses via postal mail by public figures are scarce or nonexistent and often not personal responses but responses by a public figure's management team.
Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.
A letter is a written message conveyed from one person to another through a medium. Something epistolary means that it is a form of letter writing. The term usually excludes written material intended to be read in its original form by large numbers of people, such as newspapers and placards, although even these may include material in the form of an "open letter". The typical form of a letter for many centuries, and the archetypal concept even today, is a sheet of paper that is sent to a correspondent through a postal system. A letter can be formal or informal, depending on its audience and purpose. Besides being a means of communication and a store of information, letter writing has played a role in the reproduction of writing as an art throughout history. Letters have been sent since antiquity and are mentioned in the Iliad. Historians Herodotus and Thucydides mention and use letters in their writings.
An anonymous remailer is a server that receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and that forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. There are cypherpunk anonymous remailers, mixmaster anonymous remailers, and nym servers, among others, which differ in how they work, in the policies they adopt, and in the type of attack on the anonymity of e-mail they can resist. Remailing as discussed in this article applies to e-mails intended for particular recipients, not the general public. Anonymity in the latter case is more easily addressed by using any of several methods of anonymous publication.
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the list".
UUCP is a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers.
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
When a message is replied to in e-mail, Internet forums, or Usenet, the original can often be included, or "quoted", in a variety of different posting styles.
A fan club is an organized group of fans, generally of a celebrity. Most fan clubs are run by fans who devote considerable time and resources to support them. There are also "official" fan clubs that are run by someone associated with the person or organization the club is centered on. This is the case for many musicians, sports teams, etc.
Direct marketing is a form of communicating an offer, where organizations communicate directly to a pre-selected customer and supply a method for a direct response. Among practitioners, it is also known as direct response marketing. In contrast to direct marketing, advertising is more of a mass-message nature.
A bounce message or just "bounce" is an automated message from an email system, informing the sender of a previous message that the message has not been delivered. The original message is said to have "bounced".
MuchOnDemand is an hour-long per broadcast viewer interactive television program aired on MuchMusic, Monday through Friday at 5pm ET. It was broadcast live from 299 Queen Street West in Toronto, Ontario. The Best of MuchOnDemand, aired Sundays at 10am ET, highlighting the best moments on the show from the past week. MuchOnDemand acted as MuchMusic's flagship show in a similar manner as MTV's U.S. music video countdown show Total Request Live.
Self-service password reset (SSPR) is defined as any process or technology that allows users who have either forgotten their password or triggered an intruder lockout to authenticate with an alternate factor, and repair their own problem, without calling the help desk. It is a common feature in identity management software and often bundled in the same software package as a password synchronization capability.
Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed, but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.
A challenge–response system is a type of that automatically sends a reply with a challenge to the (alleged) sender of an incoming e-mail. It was originally designed in 1997 by Stan Weatherby, and was called Email Verification. In this reply, the purported sender is asked to perform some action to assure delivery of the original message, which would otherwise not be delivered. The action to perform typically takes relatively little effort to do once, but great effort to perform in large numbers. This effectively filters out spammers. Challenge–response systems only need to send challenges to unknown senders. Senders that have previously performed the challenging action, or who have previously been sent e-mail(s) to, would be automatically
There are many published theories about the politics of the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling, which range from them containing criticism of racism to anti-government sentiment and the books have argued to contain both liberal and conservative themes and viewpoints. According to Inside Higher Ed, doctoral theses have been devoted to the Harry Potter books. There are also several university courses centred on analysis of the Potter series, including an upper division political science course.
The Office of Presidential Correspondence is one of the largest and oldest offices in the White House, and is a component of the Office of the White House Staff Secretary. In the administration of Joe Biden, the Office of Presidential Correspondence was led by Director Eva Kemp. Kemp left the office in September 2021 to become Vice President at Precision Strategies. Deputy Director Garrett Lamm was promoted to take over for Kemp after her departure.
Wizarding World Digital is a digital publishing, e-commerce, entertainment and news company. It offers news, features, and articles as well as new and previously unreleased writing by J. K. Rowling regarding the Wizarding World. The site features Rowling's thoughts, several pages of unpublished text, and a sales resource for e-book and audiobook versions of the seven Harry Potter novels through Pottermore Publishing.
A sasaeng or sasaeng fan is the South Korean term for an obsessive fan who acts in ways that invade the privacy of Korean idols, drama actors or other public figures as the threat of entertainment industry. One of the most notable of such activities is stalking. The term sasaeng comes from the Korean words sa meaning "private" and saeng meaning "life", in reference to the fans' intrusion into celebrities' private lives.
Miss Americana is a 2020 American documentary film that follows the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and her life over the course of several years of her career. It was directed by Lana Wilson, produced by Tremolo Productions, and released to Netflix and select theaters on January 31, 2020. The film is titled after "Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince", a 2019 song by Swift.
All the Young Dudes is a fan fiction written by Archive of Our Own (AO3) user MsKingBean89 set in the Harry Potter universe. It was written from March 2017 to November 2018, is over 500,000 words long and contains 188 chapters. The story takes its title from the song, "All the Young Dudes", by the English rock band, Mott the Hoople and interweaves music from the 1970s in its chapters.
