Spammers Say the Darndest Things

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.'"

Comments

I know what he means

[thermian]

I use Gmail, so the spam I get is nicely packed into the spam folder.

I don't just clear it though. An amusing minute can be had reading the subject lines they come up with before hitting the delete button.

Some more data for your entertainment

[badger.foo]

I generally do not get a lot of spam, but one episode recently made me collect some samples and blog about them (/.ed as Giving Your Greytrapping a Helping Hand).

That page also contains references such as the complete listing of subject lines from spammers caught in our blacklists over a few years' time.

Enjoy!

The most ingenious idea

[Phroggy]

The best idea I ever saw for spam subject lines was simply using random news headlines. Knowing full well it was spam and that the message body had nothing to do with the headline, I still had to fight the urge to open the message to read what it said. The headline caught my attention (I think a lot of them were political FUD attacks during the election) and I wanted to click on it to see more.

Sometimes regular people can be too clever...

[bennomatic]

Back in '04, a friend of mine was volunteering for the Kerry campaign, and his email for rallying the troops against Bush and Cheney had the subject line: "Let's Lick Dick and Bush Together".

Needless to say, I remember being annoyed that my spam filter hadn't caught it, and manually deleting it without even checking to see who it was from.

A few weeks later, we were both at a dinner, and he was talking about his efforts, and I asked him to include me in his correspondence so I could help out, and he said he had, that I just hadn't ever responded. After a little back and forth, we figured out where the miscommunication was.