"Madame, bear in mind That princes govern all things--save the wind." -Victor Hugo, The Infanta's Rose

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Creative Spam

I get lots of junk mail, a common problem for anyone with an e-mail account these days. Because most service providers and email clients have filters that will intercept the more obvious crap (e.g., any message containing the word "Viagra"), bulk mailers have had to be craftier in coming up with messages that will appear to the filtering algorithms as "genuine" email from a real person. A common ploy is to include blocks of random text in the body of the email, generated by software developed especially for this purpose (what a waste of programming talent!). Most of this psuedo-text is complete gibberish, but every now and then it makes just enough sense to be entertaining. For example, along with a link to a paid web site where I could "get the most wanted chart tunes and albums", this bit of spam I received today also included the following gem of wisdom:
"Any bowling ball can figure out a financial spider, but it takes a real razor blade to seek a mating ritual. If a surly pork chop dances with a boiled grizzly bear, then the tape recorder around a stovepipe dies. Now and then, a judge near a tripod borrows money from a minivan defined by the bottle of beer. Another financial photon, the umbrella, and another somewhat polka-dotted CEO are what made America great!"
What a hoot. This almost makes me want more spam. But not quite.

4 Comments:

  • At 1/10/2007 03:32:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Wait a minute - you actually READ your spam? Isn't that what they want you to do?

     
  • At 1/10/2007 09:42:00 PM, Blogger Mr. Toast said…

    On this particular occasion I was scanning through the stuff in my junk filter, checking to be sure no legitimate mail had slipped through, when this jumped out at me. I am proud to report, however, that I did not click on the web link contained in it, so even though they got my attention, their mission ultimately ended in failure. Die, evil spammers!

     
  • At 1/10/2007 10:44:00 PM, Blogger Sphincter said…

    I think more minivans should be defined by beer. That's what REALLY made this country great. Screw the polka-dotted CEOs!

     
  • At 1/12/2007 03:34:00 PM, Blogger bossann said…

    That's the job I want...Programatically creating mad-libs...NOT! but a fun read, none the less...

     

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