Spam
I could go off on a huge diatribe about spam, but who doesn’t hate spam? Come on – if it was something that people liked, it probably would have been called ‘baskets of puppies’ or something like that instead of ‘spam’. Instead, all I want to know is who mistakes spam for anything other than a scam in a convenient email format? Are these people too tired to find the nearest Three Card Monty game? Are there people who are contemplating getting their prescription filled at the store down the street until they get an email titled ‘XANAX, VALIUM, Cia1is, \/IAGRA ALL AT LOWEST PRICE, SHIIP ALL COUNTRIES open received matter team’? After all, run on sentences with numbers in place of letters and spelling mistakes are what all the fortune 500 companies are using in their marketing campaigns these days.
Something I have noticed is that my different email addresses receive a different kind of junk mail. My yahoo account gets the typical run of the mill sexual/financial/free laptop emails that are so popular with the kids these days. But my Canada.com address gets spam from a whole other dimension. Two recent examples were titled ‘hoosegow crossbill bearish’ and ‘cryptanalytic chimera’.
As if the average spam email didn’t have a hard enough time with getting a reader to actually believe that they’re credible, my Canada.com address gets these wonderful letters with haiku-inspired subject lines. Although I was running low on my hoosegow crossbill bearish supplies, I didn’t actually open the email as I decided I would just wait until my next visit to Walmart so I could pick up a 6-pack there instead. After all, no one beats Walmart on the price of a 6-pack of some quality HCB.
One thing I haven’t fully decided about is the name spammers choose as the ‘sender’. On the relative scale of spam (1 being annoying, 10 also being annoying, and 5 being mildly amusing in a spam kind of way), what is ‘worse’? Is it worse to get spam or a virus that tries to appear to be from a generic friend (ex. ‘Ray’, ‘James’, whatever) with a subject title trying to convince you to open it (‘that file’, ‘is this yours?’, ‘open this, fucker’), until you realize that you don’t know anyone named ‘Ray’ who really cares whether you get a file? Or is it worse to receive spam from someone named ‘Free Laptop’ (wow, growing up with a name like that must have been so tough) with an email about ‘Need a laptop? Get a free IBM Thinkpad!’?
Of course, you can have fun with spam…or technically with email viruses. The next time there’s an email virus going around (and the odds are it will be here before the next bus), make the most of the opportunity. Why should 16 year-old high-school geeks get all the fun? Find out what the virus email is called, and send off an email with the same title. All your friends will think you’re the kind of dumbass that opens emailed viruses despite constant warnings from everyone from the government to the media to your employer’s IT department to Spiderman telling you not to. While that may not appear to be overly funny, you’ll know deep down that you momentarily made them scared that they had a virus that would affect their porn – and you can’t put a price on that.
Update: Link to
Spam Sandwich, the second part of this subject.
