As a guy I get a few viagra type spam emails a day in my spam folder. Do they not send these emails if your first name is female such as Mary?
Why not? Maybe their old man needs help.
They have no idea what your first name it. They just have a gigantic list of email addresses and hit send.
I have a female first name which is part of my email address & I get them all the time.
Yes. Ugh, when my mom first got online she would constantly ask me, “Why would they send me this, don’t they know?” It took months for her to get used to the idea of spam and how they don’t care who they send it to.
Yes, and I even get offers for products that can increase the size of my p3n1s. I don’t know what a p3n1s is, but it’s a pretty safe bet that I don’t have one. 
If it’s any consolation, I get them for breast implants (and enlargement creams/pills), various yeast infection creams, and estrogen tabs–none of which I’m a likely target audience for.
Apparently they think I want to date asian women. I get that spam everyday.
Wait, you don’t want to date Asian women? I was just trying to be polite and share, but I guess I’ll keep them all for myself then.
Twenty-some years ago, when I first started receiving emails, I got these two right after each other:
*- Gain inches and make her scream with pleasure!!!
- Lose inches quick & painlessly without diets!!*
I deleted both.
But I wonder what would have happened had I clicked on both at the same time.
Nah, I’m good. Thanks anyway.
There was a time when you could opt-out of Google ads. That is, select and ad, and say, “Stop showing it it to me.” And there were browse-able options. I saw Google’s assessment of me as to way I wanted to see certain ads – and it plainly said, “You are male.” So it knows.
Why exactly Google Ads believes its reasonable that the fact that I’m male means that I want to click on an ad for a Russian dating service remains a point I will always dispute with them.
Yup, I don’t get nearly as much spam as I used to, but a large fraction of it is for viagra and other things that will enlarge body parts I don’t have. I used to just leave it sitting in my spam folder. Then I did a virus check one day and learned that about half of the viagra ads were infected. Which struck me as amusing in a computers-imitate-life sort of way.
I also used to administer a mailbox for a club, along with two gay guys. It was a free yahoo mailbox, and came with all sorts of ads and crap on the page. Typically, when I logged on, I would see ads for “Christian Singles” (none of us was Christian, nor single) and chats that had been initiated by persons (or more likely bots) with names like “bigboobs4U”.
I think the defining feature of span is that it’s sent promiscuously, without regard to who might get it.
I love the way my isp works. They have “gray listing”, where dubious sources get an “error, retry” message. A lot of spam is distributed via anonymous relay, so the error message never gets back to the sender. I get like ten or fifteen pieces of spam a week, and much of it is fairly harmless.
I get them for dating HOT ASIAN BEAUTIES! Finding RUSSIAN BRIDES! and hooking up with HOT MARRIED LADIES! all the time.
It’s gonna take an awful lot of that 100% Natural Herbal V ! A G R A! that WORKS!!!
For a few months I got spam advertising gay military-themed porn, several a day. After those stopped, I started getting ads for gay religious-themed porn (no, but seriously).
I’m a straight, atheist pacifist. They REALLY messed up their demographic research.
I used to get all sorts of e-mails with subject lines like “Trip small animals with your big giant dick”. I have to admit some of them made me laugh.
Sort of reminds me of the time I received on the same day an invitation to join the NRA and an invitation to “tell the NRA to go to hell!” in snail-mail. This was back when organizations still hadn’t figured out what ‘libertarian’ meant. I took the contents of each and stuffed them into the post-paid envelope of the other and dropped them into the mail.
Viagra, loving Russian brides, loving Filipinas, loving Asians, loving…
oh, and tricks to make my dick bigger.
Yes.