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Aug 11
2008
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Straight to the Spam Folder: Astonishing E-Mail Messages You'll Never OpenPosted by admin in Untagged |
Spamming is an underappreciated art form. In fact, "hated" may be a more accurate adjective. Like mimes in a public square, spammers seek to capture the attention of people who actively try to avoid them. Thus they must strike fast and hard, bewildering their prey with astonishing bombast, no-holds-barred familiarity, and too-good-to-be-true promises. Much depends on the effectiveness of their initial pitch--the e-mail header--and in exploiting that space, they put practitioners of haiku to shame, delivering their come-on to the rubes (that is, us) in a single line and usually in far fewer than 17 syllables.
And yet if you equip your e-mail program with a good spam filter (we at HostGJ use the Postini service), you're unlikely to see the fruits of the spammer's labor unless you enter the world of the Quarantine Summary, where "potential junk or virus-infected messages" go to die. If you think of your daily trip to the quarantine zone as a usually fruitless scan for wrongly incarcerated messages, it can't help but seem a nuisance. But if you go there looking for poetry, Delphic mystery, and fortune-cookie philosophy, you can discover gems of unrecognized genius.
So let's take a spin through the quarantined messages of HostGJ editorial staff and see what wisdom our spammers wish to impart to a cynical, uncaring world. Our guarantee: All of the e-mail headers listed here are certified as-is, found-in-the-filter, pure organic spam, without any artificial editorial enhancements. (However, since spammers have the naughty habit of commandeering innocent people's e-mail addresses in order to gain a patina of legitimacy--and since innocent people are not above filing nasty lawsuits--I have altered the e-mail addresses included here