Has anyone else gotten dozens of these emails every week? I just delete them without even opening them, and I don’t remotely care what they’re trying to get me to buy or click on, but what the hell is the purpose of a badly constructed insult as a sales tactic? Am I supposed to be so enraged that I open the email thinking, “I’ll show you, buddy,” and then I’m so intrigued by their promise of Paris Hilton videos, male organ enhancement techniques, or refinancing plans that I decide to follow a link to their malware-ridden enterprise? Who entrusts their organ or their mortgage or even their pornography decisions to “What a stupid face you have” people?
This is going to sound weird, but I remember when spam was better.
Yeah, I’ve been getting one or two a day in my spam filter. I must admit I’m curious about who the hell is using such an idiotic come-on (but not curious enough to open one yet).
I have seen a ton of those. I use gmail, so they don’t really get through, but I check out my spam bucket occasionally for poops and chuckles, and spam recipes, courtesy of google ads.
I think maybe the idea is that we’re supposed to believe they’ve got a picture of us making a stupid face or something.
I prefer the ones where they tell me I can have a huge penis. I’m willing to bet that they cannot give me a pill for that.
I get tons of these things - the idea seems to be that deliberately provocative comments will get a response. Since I have a higher IQ than a can of tomato soup, they do indeed get a response (shift-delete).
There seems to be some sort of evolution or speciation going on here; the initial one was “What a stupid face you have here [name]”, but the “You look really stupid [name]” split off early on, and there’s been a rash, recently, of “[name] is a moron”. Well, quite. But not enough of one to open the email.
(The silly thing is, I get these things because I’m an ML on the NaNoWriMo boards, and the group email addy for the region I moderate has been harvested by spammers … and NaNoWriMo hasn’t got its SpamAssassin software set up properly to filter this crap out, but that’s another rant. So, “[name]” in all the above examples is the name of the group. So it’s grossly inaccurate - we are several morons, with several stupid faces. And as for the ones which go “I caught you naked in the shower [nameofgroup]” … trust me, sunbeam, if you’d caught just me alone naked, you wouldn’t be emailing anyone about it, and the sight of all of us would strike you blind, deaf, and doubly incontinent.)
(I agree, though, the standard of spam has gone downhill. All those emails with headers beginning “I want sale you Rolex”, it’s like a third-world bazaar … )
Seriously, mine aren’t even configuring their shaky PERL scripts to mail merge my name in anymore.
I only have two spam, one is boring “you have been chosen to stand in for the next of kin” 419 stuff.
But this one just read so great I now have the last paragraph (the one with Africa Clothes) as my status on GMail:
Seriously, whatever you do do NOT tell them money is in the box! Don’t do it! I’m watching you! And seriously does pretending you talked to them a long time ago really make people create like, false memories of this stuff? There can’t be any noticeable volume of people THAT dense, dense enough to fall for a scam maybe, but not to say “oh yeah I remember that completely non-existent event!”
That and the gratuitous English makes me cringe (this isn’t “High school dropout” or “minor error” stuff, I’m 90% sure this is at least partially babelfish translation)
In other words:
My favorite are the ones that look like breaking news. I got one today that had as its subject “Clinton Shot In Public”. Yeah, I’m sure if a Clinton was shot, the first I’d hear of it would be email.
