Monday, July 09, 2007

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.

2 comments:

Heather W. Reichgott said...

If it ferments long enough, I end up with spam moonshine. Yum yum!

Lea said...

One of my favorite of all times came to everyone at work. The subject was "Your Viagra Order" and in the 'To' line was the name of an old dude who works here and all others were 'ccd'. What fun that was!