I just got an email — two, actually — with the text “Hossein has sent you a cold drink.  To accept this gift please click the following link.”

Anyone else get this?  Anyone know what is going on?

I wouldn’t suggest clicking.  It could just be spam, or it could link to disturbing or illegal media, or viruses or other malware, or pages that make you have to externally terminate your whole browser because the page has locked you in a loop.

So, I wouldn’t click it.  But if you have, please let me know what the hell it is.  If it’s a page that makes Bleinheim’s OLD #3 HOT pour out a USB cable, I might reconsider.  I think chilled ginger ale coming out of my computer would be awesome.

I just got a Spam message with the title “dixon mole expectorate interrogatory cheerleader”.  I marked it spam, then had second thoughts, and thought, “I’ve got to see this one” (yes, I occasionally think in italics) and clicked “Undo”.  Here are the contents:

——————————
dukedom tombstone sisal? bygone, tombstone dixon.
lawmen upperclassmen bygone materiel cheerleader tombstone, barr
dukedom interrogatory cinematic quill built.

footpad man mole

barr academia univariate? circumstance, speck materiel.
montpelier barr built cromwellian litton espousal, barr
footpad allow retiree montpelier sisal.

crater toady man

campsite quill dukedom? sisal, bygone vertebrate.

lawmen cinematic.
——————————

That’s it.  No link, no misspelled drug name, no implication that I should be worried about the size of any of my body parts, no comma-plus-an-exclamation-point to render it in the imperative.  Just that aphasic string.  For what?  Channel testing?  List pruning?  Anarchy?  Better ideas?

I am being bombarded with a new spam campaign.  A typical email contains the following text:

Furthermore, safety, privacy, discretion, and time are all major factors.

It is then followed by a URL.  The software generating the messages, though, is smart enough to shuffle the order of the “factor” words around, and sometimes omit one of them.  So I tried creating a “Delete It” filter in Gmail that matches all email with the words “safety”, “privacy”, and “discretion”.  That would eliminate 80% of spam from this campaign.  However, according to a test search, I would miss quite a few messages from the ACLU….

So, I made a blunder today.  But let’s go back twenty-something years to start.

I was in love with Victorinox Swiss Army Knives from the mid 1980s.  One of the (many) reasons I was looking forward to going to Switzerland with my family was my ability to purchase, in Switzerland, one of my beloved knives.

Today, I get an email from slickdeals.net advertising — what else — a top-of-the-line, $80+ Swiss Army Knife for under $35.  The sale is one of their “Gold Box Lightning Sales”, which means it has a duration of minutes to hours.  So I go to GMail and send out a quick email to, oh, just about everyone, telling them about the sale.

Then the proverbial X hits the Y.

It’s kind of funny to me, now, in a rather embarrassed way, the first time I’ve been reasonably accused of spamming.  But yes, that’s what happened — everything from pure jest to someone seriously threatening to block my emails.

I can’t really claim any extenuating circumstances, so let this be a warning to you: if you see an awesome deal, even if you think everyone you know might be interested in it, spammers have ruined it for the rest of us, and sending out a mass email to all your friends might not be the best route to go.

Anyway, I ordered my knife, and I hope some other people were able to order knives of their own — if you’re not already Leatherman devotees or something.

And if you got the email and hated it, I’m really sorry.

OK, any guesses on how much spam I receive, per day?

Seriously, hazard a guess.

Since I don’t want the email and (maybe) feed readers to just show the number, please click here for the answer.

That’s my number.  Care to share yours?  Average across 30 days if you can.

Do you think we could ask Gmail to put a really unlikely names filter into their program?  I just don’t get legitimate email from anybody named Redler Sanbrough, Pinn Copping, Metter Vittetoe, or Britschgi Buren — not to mention Rainwaters Risby (if you’re writing a TV pilot, feel free to steal that one).  It’s obvious to me that the software is just picking a random first name and a random last name.  Why can’t it be obvious to Gmail?

(Because that essentially racist NLP, one of the relatively few things that you both can’t and shouldn’t do.  Dumbass.)

Reminds me of the hilarious joke (so many levels to the humor): If Muhammad is the most common first name in the world, and Chen is the most common family name, why do you meet so few people named Muhammad Chen?

Look who the louses are who own envelopes.com.  Not only are they producing spam, they’re doing so with tons of (likely) toxic inks.

Note that none of their examples has the tell-tale giveaway: the indicium in the upper-right that says “Bulk Rate Postage Paid”.  When you get a letter, ignore the pretty birdies and look in the upper-right.  Almost nothing useful is sent less than First Class.  Unfortunately, yes, that’s “almost nothing”.  I’ve gotten $40 rebates sent third-class mail.

The YesForCalifornia campaign appears to be buying up ancient email lists and spamming the Californians they find on it.  They used an email address for me I have not used in a decade.

worldwineboutique.com (no link) is an internet wine shop.  And a spammer.  As this site has higher traffic than their own site, I’m sure this will show up in Google searches, and probably higher than theirs.  If you oppose spam, don’t order from the site.

In the past six months, exactly, I have received exactly 160,928 pieces of spam in my inbox.  If every one of those had come in the mail, in addition to all the dead trees, I would have kilos and kilos of stamps to sell off as a “mission mix”.  A pretty nice one, with Russian and Chinese and Nigerian stamps in there.

But of course spammers don’t pay for their mailings, instead making you pay for their mailings.  That’s why they exist, and that’s why they are scum.

We need an efficient micropayments scheme in the world.  A way in which we can give fractions of cents to people.  We could have wireless agents and web agents do the negotiation for us.  Set your phone so that if a beggar asks for money, it automatically gives them a nickel without showing up on your radar at all (this is a plot element of the sci-fi novel I’m writing.)  We could, instead of challenge-response, just charge people a tenth or twentieth of a cent to email each of us.  Nobody legitimate would notice (you’d have to send 2000 emails a month to have it cost you a buck) but it would stop the spammers dead in their tracks.

There’s more, but I’ll save it for the novel.

The presumably-foreign spammer who keep asking me to go to their site to talk to a pretty girl have a list of names they are pulling from, apparently.  Clue: you won’t pique my interest by talking about a girl named Hellga [sic].

I received a junk fax today advertising an undervalued stock. The disclaimer at the bottom of the fax informed me that the company sending out the faxes had received $219,965 to produce and distribute the “newsletter”. Good grief. If it’s not making the spammers rich, it’s making the telcos and the USPS some nice money.

From staff@mcgees.org Tue Mar 9 00:26:32 2004

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Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 02:26:32 -0600

Subject:  Important notify about your e-mail account.

From: staff@mcgees.org

Message-ID: <uhodpaoyyjfxwdlpvbp@mcgees.org>

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=”——–njfnkpfuvllatwneivch”

X-SpamBouncer: 1.7 (11/06/03)

X-SBScore: 0 (Spam Threshold: 10) (Block Threshold: 5)

X-SBClass: OK

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To: “Joshua McGee, Scanned” <joshua@mcgees.org>

Content-Length: 13350

Dear user of  “mcgees.org” mailing system,

Your e-mail account will be  disabled because of improper using in next

three days,  if you are  still wishing to  use it,  please, resign your

account information.

Please,  read the attach  for further details.

For security reasons  attached  file is password protected. The

password is “28174″.

The Management,

   The  mcgees.org  team

http://mcgees.org

Attachment: Information.zip

That was nice of “The mcgees.org Management team” (that would be me) to send that to myself, wasn’t it?  And nice of my spam filter to let it through?

Used to spam messages claiming “A special offer just for you,” I was vaguely amused by the subject of a message trapped by my filter, namely “We are sending this hot recommendation to millions“.  At last they had the decency to come right out and admit it.

It’s bad enough that I have to be spammed constantly with offers of pharmaceuticals.  The least they could do would be to figure how to spell “prescription”.

The weird thing is, I don’t think he’s kidding.

If you have a policy against responding to spam you get, skirt around that problem by responding to spam I got.  Go to the Bombay Sapphire (gin) website and participate in their gorgeous interactive contest.  You could win a beautiful piece of art valued at over US$5,000; but even if you don’t win, the site design and the artistic merit of the content makes the trip worthwhile.

eFax have just sent a fax to the subscribers of their free service to inform them of a service ‘enhancement’:

eFax.com is introducing a new program designed to help ensure you get the high-quality Internet faxing you need.  eFax.com will now be faxing select special offers exclusively to our free customers.

So, opt out?  They tell you how: “Please consider upgrading to eFax Plus.”  I have been a customer for over three years.  The eFax Messenger Plus reader already contains a revolving banner ad, but I still should have seen the end of this too-good-to-be-true spam-free service coming. 

If you are curious, you can download the fax they sent.  You can choose between the native eFax version (this requires you download the monetarily-free eFax Messenger) and my GIF conversion.  If you are interested, the conversion involved printing to an Apple LaserWriter driver; there is no “print to file” option in the Print dialog so one has to set this on the printer properties.  This created a .prn file, which I then renamed to a .ps file.  I then loaded the .ps file in GhostView, converted it to a 16M-color bitmap at 120 dpi, opened the bitmap in Paint Shop Pro, converted it to a GIF and saved it.  You’re welcome.