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Spammers Say the Darndest Things

Posted by timothy on from the missing-the-target-audience dept.

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Bill Sweetman has a tongue-in-cheek post about how a few years ago he started collecting some of the more outlandish and amusing email subject lines from the many thousands of spam emails he received promoting various 'solutions' related to his private parts. Sweetman, a Canadian internet marketeer now working for Tucows gets a guilty pleasure from the copywriting 'skills' of the spammers. 'Sometimes the writing is clever. Sometimes it is accidentally funny. And sometimes it's just plain bizarre.' Sweetman writes that it takes a certain twisted creative genius to make your spam message stand out from the rest. and gives us ten of his favorite spam subject lines as well as his would-be replies to the messages. Favorites spam subject lines include 'Small friend is for hiding, big friend is for showing off' and Sweetman's reply: 'Even if the product they are pitching works as promised, I still don't think I would be walking around the neighborhood showing off the results.'"

5 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Not even funny ... just boring ... like spam ... by tomhudson · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Must be a slow news day ... oh, right, it's Sunday.

  2. You can hope in one hand... by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ... And shit in the other, and see which fills up first. He closes by saying

    I hope the days of the spammer are numbered. Until then, at least we have can enjoy a good laugh at their expense.

    But yet almost nothing is being done to actually stop people from sending spam. You can filter and whitelist/blacklist all you want, but that won't stop spammers from spamming. At no point does a spammer likely ever consider whether or not their spam will reach your box; it is a trivial cost for them.

    Spammers will continue spamming as long as they can make money doing it. And a spammer poetry contest is equally as useless for impeding that as filters.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:You can hope in one hand... by hacker · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You can filter and whitelist/blacklist all you want, but that won't stop spammers from spamming. [...] Spammers will continue spamming as long as they can make money doing it.

      Completely and utterly false myth. Spammers don't make money from sending email, they get money from people reading it and then buying the trash they're peddling. If filtering works, upstream or at the local mailbox, then the recipients won't see the mail, won't buy the products, and won't give the spammers money. Problem solved.

      Filtering works... and as a testimony to that, I haven't seen a single spam in my mailbox in over 4 years, and maybe a handful of false positives each year, which I retrain with a click and never have to worry about it again. dspam rocks, and blows away everything out there, including SpamAssassin, Gmail's filtering and every other commercial solution I've ever seen. I put Graymilter in front of dspam and sendmail, and the amount of incoming spam my MTA receives and processes immediately dropped by 90%.

      If we reduce the amount of overall spam delivered locally or upstream through filtering, we stop stupid people from contributing their income to the bank accounts of these spammers. It's a win:win.

    2. Re:You can hope in one hand... by dissy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I hope the days of the spammer are numbered. Until then, at least we have can enjoy a good laugh at their expense.

      But yet almost nothing is being done to actually stop people from sending spam.

      You should really get started on that, you have a lot of work ahead of you.

      You say 'nothing is being done' as if you expect others to do it for you. Some people are, and cheers to them. Are you?
      If so, then my apologies, and a cheers to you too. Otherwise you don't have much room to complain.

      You can pitch in and help too, anything from technical expertise (coding new better filters) to legal expertise (better laws to deal with the problem, realistic things to enforce) to financial ($$ donated to those whom do) and everything in between.

  3. Re:"Men will see your power in every public shower by Feminist-Mom · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, I agree. Although that could just be his personal style. I've noticed a lot of my more uptight friends are really horrified by these emails, or simply make believe to misinterpret them.