Land of Oz

Spam

Here's a quick printout of some spam from today. This is only about a third of the ones I got with generally the same title. Come on people - do you really think that sending me a dozen copies of the exact message are going to increase the chances of me responding? Like gee, if there's 22 identical copies, the message must be important?


Every now and then I review the crap in the spam folder of one of my accounts just to see what's going on in there. This account, from yahoo, gets around 100-300 spams each and every day. It's one of my "throw-away" accounts so I expect that. If I have to register with an email account someplace I use this one - so naturally it gets spammed a lot. However, I have a hotmail account for almost the same reason and it gets less than a couple spams a week. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

Let's say I was in the mood to buy something or otherwise respond to a spam message. Would I really respond to a company that can't spell or even use half-way correct grammar? I know I've brought this up before, but just what kind of idiot must you be to respond to an email that can't even spell its title correctly. I know they do that in the hopes of getting past spam filters, but what kind of burned-out brain must you have in order to answer one of these emails? Are you actually going to trust your health to a company that can't even correctly spell the medicine it wants to pawn off on you?

The most amazing thing is that people do - every day. I've seen numbers that say if spammers get a 1:10,000 respond rate they can make money. That must mean that one out of every 10,000 individuals smart enough to turn on a computer is stupid enough to respond to some idiot's spam -- and that's frightening.