Spam.

[icebluenothing]

I remember when spam used to make sense. (Okay, I can remember when it didn't freakin' exist, but that aside .... )

You know -- when someone would send me mail telling me that with their amazing product, I could increase my ejaculation volume, I knew what was up with that. I understood, to use marketing jargon here, what the value proposition was, as it were. They had a product, they figured I might have money, and by letting me know about it, they thought that, perhaps, the next time I felt the urge to be able to top off large beer steins with my own semen, I might think of them and their product. Fair enough. With you so far.

But lately, I've been getting spam from fucking Neptune, as near as I can figure. The subject lines are innocuous enough, something like "Important Information," and when I'm bored enough, I'll sit here and think, "Oh, look, this Information is Important! I had best read it at once!" So I open it up, and instead of telling me how I can increase my breast size by opening my bank account to an important official in Nigeria, there's totally random noise. Words pulled at random out of the dictionary. Or strings of letters in no human language.

What the hell is going on here? I understand that they're trying to get past Bayesian filtering, okay, fine, but -- I see your windup, but where's the pitch? What are you trying to sell me? Have I just forgotten how to read? What?

Comments

[darkmane.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the possibility it is just random words trying to get you to open the email and infect yourself.

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

Oh, I suppose that's true. And if I were using anything other than Pine to read my e-mail, I might be worried. *shrug*

[darkmane.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah. I thought you did that. You're safe.

Now to convine the other 85% of the computer users in the world to stop using MSFT mail readers.

Neptune? Try Alpha Centauri

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

I must admit the bit about the beer steins still has me laughing even minutes after first reading it. Very funny. Besides fiction, ever though of doing comedic essays?

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

What you're looking at is the reason we won't be replaced by computers anytime soon. A lot of that stuff is computer-generated and a human doesn't interact with it beyond running the program.

My favorites--Tablet gets these all the time--are the ones that contain one word, or a single string of random characters.

[chronicdisorder.livejournal.com]

i thought they were coded messages from Al Qaeda...

so they want you

[noiseinmyhead.livejournal.com]

to increase your breast size...and me my penius length.......

[luchog.livejournal.com]

Some of the garbage stuff is also part of a tracking macro that uses a happy little Outlook feature that allows them to verify that you've opened the message and that your address is valid and not a spamtrap.

Hooray for Pine