[SPAM]

Who are the spammers and what do they want with me?

They definitely want to enlarge my penis; the problem is, I don’t have a penis. Why aren’t they instead sending me spam about increasing my bust size? Now that might pique my curiosity -- I might even open up that email.

Because that is what they want, right? They want you to open the email message and link to some site where they can sell you something, or much worse, make your computer a spam botnet. It’s today’s version of junk mail with added potential risk to the recipient. But spammers are here to stay, and they’re only going to get more aggressive and continue to move more of their operations overseas to avoid US laws and lawsuits.

It’s something that a modern day Batman and Robin might choose to tackle:

I sometimes get incredibly annoyed by all the "unsolicited commercial e-mail" in my inbox, especially if the spam filters are not working so well at the office. You see, I’ve been working at the same company for 11 years (yes, please, please somebody offer me a new job!), so over the years have accumulated five personal email addresses along with two more general company email address. Needless to say, I get a lot of spam. If, as I mentioned above, the company spam filters are not performing as they should be, it’s normal for me to get about 20 times more spam than legitimate email. That’s irritating, no? But again, spam is a part of life now -- at least for anyone with a working email address, which is pretty much everyone I know.

So a few weeks back, when my office spam was completely out of control, I decided to embrace the spam, to skim all of the often nonsensical subject lines and try to find some humor in them.

It really wasn’t hard.

Some of the evil mad spammers do have a sense of humor.

Take Antonio for example, his subject line is: Ding ding dong extension! Or Tamara Britton, who suggests that her product will enable you to: Fondle all her internal nerve endings. Nyffeler’s product is going to: Shock your lady speechless, while Cassie Prater, who is perhaps Scottish, promises: Huge tool to please your lassie.


Others offer:
Global warming in your pants!
Gain a huge cannon for love.
Get yourself an immense love gun!
Drastically raise mountain in your pants!


Or what about this modern day spam platitude: The longest dick is the shortest way to a woman’s heart. Or the inverse: Nothing else can arouse more female derision, than its tiny dimension.

Here's one that I have not personally received, but I truly appreciate the illustration: Bigger flute

Ouch. I guess one's flute can be too long.

So overall the viagra, cialis, and other ED-driven spam is silly and does not really bother me. And although I'm becoming more tolerant of spam in general, there is one that gets to me. I haven’t received it in a few weeks, so my self esteem is improving, but I was repeatedly being sent an email that read: What a stupid face you have here beth. That’s just plain mean, isn’t it? (Although it doesn't really make sense and sounds like it was written by a first grader.)

I decided to google it today, and guess what? I'm not the only one with a stupid face, nor am I alone in feeling slighted. The New York Times even coined the term "Pride Spam" after this particular spam messagage. It turns out the stupid-face messages do actually link to a site that will make your computer a spam botnet.

My current plan of action is to keep skimming spam subject lines for their humor, and to ignore the rest, never, ever clicking on any link, because even though I'm making peace with spam, I'm not willing to have my machine be one of their zombie machines.