Pills And Software Sold By..., Nigerian dictators and hot Asian teens

What is your favorite spam that appears in your Inbox?

Mine is the software sales with really bad spelling. The spelling is so bad it's funny.

I almost feel left out. I've been on the Internet since 1994 and I never received the classic Nigerian spam email. Almost. My spam is fairly evenly split between mortgage and male health products although my spam catching Hotmail account gets lots of attention for keystroke loggers.

Although my spam catcher does quite nicely, I still enjoy reading the spam I get. Mostly because I like to see what tricks they are doing to attempt to get past filters. For a while, they were appending jokes to the end of the messages so that always made for fun reading. Lately, it's been clippings from what I assume are wire service reports. If I were to try and defeat baysian filtering, I'd hit two places, Google news and the Project Gutenberg (public domain books) and get enough noise to hide my message. That and mark every message I ever send as spam to help me track what I need to do next to foil a filter. But, as I'm not a spammer it's more of an exercise in programmatic problem solving. Oh and my favourite has to be the make money fast by becoming a programmer.

[edit]Corrected name and spelling of Project Gutenberg and added link.[/edit]

At least they're not promising to make you rich by becoming a musician!

As a singer I used to work for said, "There's tens of dollars to be made in this business. I hope to make in the high three figures this year."

What is with all the spam I get that's in Russian? If they're so smart to steal my email address while surfing, aren't they smart enough to know I can't read cryllic?

I use Earthlink, and I LOVE their built-in Spam Blocker. They filter nearly 600 emails per day for me.

"Porn Ads"? You mean there's porn on the internet?

Nah. It's an acronym. It stands for People Only Read News.

Of course, I only read Playboy for the articles.

My favorite spams are those from people claiming to be eBay, Citibank, or PayPal saying my account will expire, unless I revisit my account and enter my account number, pin number, etc. The problem is they either misspell words because English isn't their first language, or they're trying to avoid the spam filters.


What do they expect people to think? "Hmmm, it looks like my C/i/tyba..nk Viisa is set to expire, unless I click this link that doesn't go to Citibank, and give them some information they should already have on their computer system. I'd better do this right away!"

I offered to proofread future spams from one guy. I said "Look, if you want people to think you're really Citibank, and not a common thief, you at least need to spell the words correctly." Unfortunately he didn't respond.