Thursday, August 16, 2007

Mysteries abound.

Upon checking my email, I noticed I had a larger than usual abundance of SPAM. However, this SPAM seems to be tailored to my personality. The SPAMmers of the world must realize that I know there are no hot horny single women in Webster, IN, a town I'm relatively sure is just an intersection of two country roads where all spammers seem to think I live. They know that I know that I am not going to receive a free XBox 360. They realize that I don't have a mortgage to refinance. They must know that I'm not going to invest any money in their plot to smuggle oil out of Nigeria. Instead, based on the awesome subject lines of the SPAM I'm getting, they've realized that bizarre, inexplicable surrealism is the best subject writing technique for getting my attention. Here's a sample:

1. For example, a leaf with the function set to "Leave Voice Message" and the mail.

2. In gratitude, I want to make you a present of a knife.

3. Each struct sparse contains two 12-character strings which represent an offset.

4. The same concept can probably work with a lighter-weight synchronization object such as a critical section or a mutex.

5. A reddish-haired, green-eyed, modestly-dressed man.

Now, I've heard that opening spam just causes you to get more spam. I don't want that. However, I simply have to know what the hell these emails are about. But, what if the text of the spam is equally incomprehensible? Would I have to follow the link? Should I reward spammers by giving them traffic? But these are no ordinary spammers. Perhaps the author of the mystery of the lighter-weight synchronization object deserves my attention.

These are the types of conundrums that keep me up at night.

1 comment:

purple_kangaroo said...

You can set your e-mail program to open the e-mails as read-only, and then they can't unleash any viruses just from being read.

Those e-mails, though, are the result of a spam program that goes through random files on your computer, pulls out words and sentences stored on your hard drive, sticks them randomly into an e-mail, and then sends the resulting text out to your entire address book, along with a virus.