Spam

After writing about the joys of the Internet, and Mooiness‘s comment about IRC, I realised there was one aspect of the Net that I’d forgotten about: spam! How could I forget that blight on email? I seem to get a lot more spam in my email inbox at work (thankfully my home email addresses are relatively spam-free – am I jinxing myself by announcing this fact? 😉 ).

This week, while deleting the spam, I noticed a strange phenomenon: all of the Viagra and genital enlargement spam had a number of pithy sayings included at the end of each message. A selection of these:

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

I now have no time to be tired.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

That’s it baby, when you got it, flaunt it.

They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

All art is quite useless.

No man is a hero to his wife’s psychiatrist.

What on earth??! Of course you are probably wondering why CW reads her spam? Well I don’t normally, but it all started when I inadvertently opened one message and noticed the quotes. I was intrigued and of course I had to go and look at all the other spam that was there. And of course I couldn’t just be content with noting the funny spam from one day’s email, I had to look at all the incoming spam during the course of the week. Only the Viagra-type spams had these quotes in them, the buy-Microsoft-products-for-$39.95-plus-a-free-set-of-steakknives spams didn’t have any of these strange additions to them.

I have never noticed them before. Hopefully next week I can stop myself from succumbing to my curiosity (Does this spam have some silly sayings in it? Oo, what about this one?) and just delete the stupid things! If their aim was to get some unsuspecting fool to look more closely at the message, well it worked!

Categories: spam