The Spam Files: Episode 1

I find spam simultaneously very annoying and very funny. This is in sharp contrast to my opinion on junk mail of the paper variety, which I find very annoying (and not funny at all). I have, in fact, been known to call companies which persist in clogging my home mailbox, in order to ask them please to stop killing trees in an attempt to get my business.

(Admittedly, I have also been known to attempt to get exceptionally annoying spammers in trouble with the help of Sam Spade, but I soon realized the futility of such pursuits.)

Mrs. Gerbil and I have very different approaches to spam. Whereas I will clean out my spam folder multiple times a day, she lets the messages in her spam folder ferment quietly until Gmail deletes them automatically. At any given time I have between 10 and 60 spam messages; but her spam census is consistently over 2000. I've asked her many times why she doesn't just delete them all periodically, now that one can do this with a single click. Her philosophy: Why bother? Every deleted message will just be replaced by one more, so every 30 days her spam folder goes through a complete turnover all by itself.

In my opinion, however, deleting spam by hand has its advantages. For one, I get to laugh at the randomly generated subject lines. For another, I get to share the most ridiculous ones, right here on this very blog!

So, without further ado, I bring you The Best of the Worst. Or something like that.

spam that makes you feel good about yourself.
From: Jimmie Weeks
Subject: You're not ugly

spam that tells it like it is.
From: Beatrix K. Clark
Subject: fraudulent

spam with problems.
From: Cruz Y. Lara
Subject: Hi, how your dink?

spam that knows just a little too much about our personal life.
From: Amazing Performance
Subject: Turbo sperm for you and your girl!

spam that got it backwards.
From: Relaxation
Subject: How Cialis works!

Ah, yes. The joys of randomly generated text.