Sunday, March 26, 2006

Unsolicited, Unwanted, Unending

About a month or two ago, the amount of spam I receive on a daily basis seemed to take an exponential leap, like some mass of wandering email address harvesters finally found their way home and unloaded their payload to the mother-spam-ship. It's only gotten worse in recent days, from a few a day to thirty or more. I can barely fathom the millions upon millions of this bullshit that is clogging up the world's bandwidth. I have to assume that at least some of them are viruses. But most seem to be trying to sell me software or meds I don't want, although sometimes it's hard to figure out exactly what they're selling given all the tricks they're trying to employ to evade spam filters. For example:

From: Tye Cuellar <Presumably@fake.email.deleted>
Subject: Re: aaBam89 news


k C o I p A d L t I s S
b V r A y L h I y U w M
v V f I m A y G r R f A

B nt uy your k M y e q d w i e c w a v t g i h o d n o si nline at half
e p k r s i c c b e [Deleted Evil URL]
<Deleted Evil URL>

Or perhaps this one, which, while somewhat entertaining in its bizarreness, is still annoying when you get 3-4 of them. A day.
From: Martin Gray <Another@fake.email.deleted>
Subject: Last offer- Discount special for PE patch almost over!

flowers sick funeral after orphans visit widows
fatherless write letters invitation condolence establish
missions
Maybe it would make more sense if I saw the included images, but I use a text mail reader, so I guess that's my loss.

The other day, I took a moment to think about it, and the question that came to me was: do these people actually think I want to buy any of this crap?! I can only assume that some of this is due to people trying to MAKE MONEY FAST! with that sweet stay-at-home interweb marketing gig they saw an ad for in the recycler paper on the T. But c'mon, WTF?

Coincidentally, I saw this comment on Techdirt. And I suppose the answer is right there, truth stranger than fiction: there are actually some assholes out there that are actually buying this shit. [Here's an article on the economics of spam.]

So, to you out there, though I am sure you will never read this, to you I say:

Cut it the fuck out.

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