More spam poetry

Cleaned out my spam again, deleted the via*ra stuff out, and this was what was left. Random, bizarre, strangely beautiful.

Poetic Spam

I was wading through the spam in my private E-Mail account (our spam killer at work does a really great job) and had clicked on all of these to have them deleted. I realized that these lines actually make a rather poetic statement, only the line in German seems to be a bit out of place.

The rest is just bizarre and seems to be just random words taken from the Internet (except the male tool bit).

Maybe I can start a new genre: found spam poetry.

Could you please do free work for us?

Beyond the normal 100 emails a day this past week I am being deluged with letters along the lines of "we want to sell stuff to your students/colleagues so can you please give us their addresses or send this marketing broschure - 2 MB - on to them?".

I was doing delete+ignore on most of them, the ones that were vaguely useful (i.e. "we want to hire an excellent student for a pittance") I passed on, chuckling to myself that they can't even get excellent students for good money, because they *all* *have* *jobs* right now. Really.

Others are more along the lines of "We have this great information site on X that you will surely want to look at". I answered one of them, addressed to me with my name misspelled and and saying they respected my research in area Y (I am actually in field F, very, very far away from Y) and thought I would like to look over their new materials at this site and to tell them what I think.

I answered that I had thought this was a respectable company and was shocked that they were resorting to marketing methods that smell like spam. But if they wanted to, I would do an analysis of their site for them for 800 € and they should just check back with me to set up a contract and a date.

They did answer and declined. I apparently was in their data base by mistake. Drat. That would have been easily earned money.

Spam

Our computer center tightened up their spam recognition, I have been getting almost only good email for the last few weeks. But upon hearing today that someone got my Christmas letter in their spam files, I decided to check mine. I last checked and cleared on November 21.

There were 12172 emails in the folder.

That is almost 300 a day. I checked the 300 for today - not one real letter in there. The thought of checking 670 or so pages of spam, looking for real letters, does not appeal to me. So I hit the "clear" button, it's all gone.

Spammers will eventually kill email, it seems, but there is not really anything else in the wings, is there? Do they really all make money on this, or is it only the companies that sell spam kits?