Spam

I've been trying to figure out the psychology and structure of spam e-mail.

Spam has changed quite a bit over the last few years, although it's remained as much of a nuisance as ever. Early on, you could identify it by the bizarre addresses from which it came, often consisting of random combinations of numbers and letters. Then it changed, now most often coming from what appear to be real names, although the subject lines clearly shout "SPAM!" Here are a few examples from my recently filtered-out spam:

"Botar sunnis airframe Moscort cloodle Bathen," from "Sheila Hinton;"

"Whereoscolid skant raddle kity," from "Dirk I. Griffith;" and

"festar Shocket trandoscord glow pephain," from Brenden Reyes. This one included the deeply-moving and highly-original message, "tryeboyfriend inkennecottI seeCalexei, wminutemena ineimprudent injswelter andcobblestonex onxforwentthe oecstaticsome mayCgarth butcballerina nothardingB bewinconvertiblemay 4downdraft, seeScoliform !Mcaramel notnetherlands6 itcirrelevant! rbosonsee somemobscene."

What kind of time-wasting BS is this?

All of the above e-mails wanted me in one way or another to click on a link to visit their alleged website which offer discount medicines, the opportunity to get a larger male member, or some other ridiculous thing. What makes the people who churn out this tripe think anyone with a brain would be smart enough to answer? Do they have lives beyond their endless quest to develop ever-stupider types of spam to waste our time and choke our in-boxes? Do they really have parents or are they pure ... well ... you get the idea.

Spam. You can run, but you can't hide. But you can dream: someday when I win the lottery, before I set up all the trust funds for my grandchildren, I'm going to hire a super-geek to build me a device that will track every piece of spam back to it's original designer, then send an insulting e-mail from his personal account to the local office of the IRS (for you overseas readers, that's our tax collection agency).

As fantasies go, I like it.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo