Abd's Takes
on Spam Emails!
Word under perusal: spam
Pronunciation: 'spam
Function: noun and verb
Meaning: unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses
Well well, that's the formal part of it, and so to speak, the only formal part of it. Yes ladies and gentlemen, there are neither boundaries of formalities, nor the shackles of communication etiquette when it comes to spam. Nothing beats the inventive minds behind each uniquely crafted and (personally?) sent out spam message.
Each day, we receive a large amount of spam in our inboxes; and at times one can almost guess if a message could be spam or not by just looking at the subject line, but then there are cleverly crafted ones as well that don't let us get away so easily.
Soliciting emails from companies selling 'medication', to delirious singles from the same city as you are in, coupled with far away 'relatives' from some unknown desert in southwest africa trying to give us half their wealth, added with some lonely and disparate (that's not a typo :-) housewives waiting for the perfect man who they co-incidentally? think is you, with help from a few exercise evangelists who somehow know you're worried about a weight problem, accompanied with banks and finance companies ready to give you that house loan you can't remember applying for ever, alongwith lottery promotions telling your email won a million dollars just because it had an extra 'edge' in it and stock-brokers who've got the best practical insight into your financial situation, and not to forget the love gurus who claim to know the answer to the eternal question of what women really want from a man (you mean there's more in that list?), clutter millions of inboxes like ours each day.
In all this mindless plethora of genuinely fake emails, one question that arises in my head is "do spammers ever get anything sold?" I mean, with kazillions of spam emails sent out every day, spam tactics should have 'evolved' much faster than uncle Darwin with his bunch of baboons [no offence intended to any monkeys (evolved or under-evolved) please].
Jokes (?) apart, one continues to be amazed at the fact that spammers think we will be able to sieve through all their un-decipherable gibberish and figure out the no-doubt sensible practical and financial advices contained therein.
Imagine, starting off an email with a line like "The window is useful, but accumulates scratches incredibly fast because of the extremely sensitive latex material it is made up of", and then describing stuff that's unmentionable for family blog viewing, and then finally onto the main part of all this painstaking write-up with "CHFR is climbing steady all week. Up over 23% since Monday, investors are enjoying the solid climb. Read CHFR's recent news, and get on it.
China Fruits Corporation
Symbol: CHFR
Price: $0.42".
Yes sir Mr Spammer sir, I definitely see where you are getting at with that.
And there was one email from Wynona Woodsworth (name sound familiar anyone?), with the subject 'RE: did we speak on orkut today?' and before I can get excited about the prospects, I find the email is actually for some William (hmm...), and it seems Wynona is penning down her thoughts on which 'medication' is selling cheapest and how it will help good ol' billy save his taxes. Nice stuff to discuss in Orkut scrapbooks, people.
Sometimes you can almost see a pattern in the methods which spammers have adopted in order to make up that one eye-catching subject line. Seems like there could be very well be a B-school out there churning out spammers in thousands in batches differentiated only on the basis of the methodologies taught in them. Like for example, some spammers these days seem to have adopted the approach of having (arguable) witty one-liners as their email subject, for instance 'best way to get a dog, donate a bone', [yikes!] 'Look no further, eat that toe-nail' [ouch!], 'From the desk of WagMy FatTail' [I swear I want to speak to his man, just so I can pronounce his name on his face once] 'Get your life back, fill that prescription' [whoa! which one?], 'Extra large round juicy sweatshirts' [or was it sweaty juice shirts? nevermind]...
Others still have taken to the business tactic of impress your target with profanity. They churn out email subjects like '@!#@$@ you in ^&$%@!' and 'With stuff like &$%%^&' and '$@#%% $^#% all the way upto the @*&&^' [Oh sorry spammers for umm.. whatever I've done to annoy you that much...] [And yes, I've got word-filters in place on this blog :D].
Recently there's been a spate of emails from people who's deceased relatives had somehow before passing away, told them about contacting me for taking care of their billion dollar fortune for them. [Oh how I wish that were true, I'd buy all those shares from CHFR that's climbing the stocks so well]...
And so spam continues to clutter our inboxes hour after hour, and day after day. And gathering from how the well their industry is doing, it seems that as long as there is email communication on the internet there will be spam.
Come to think of it, with the new era of voice email, and net to phone (and vice-versa) communications coming up in full swing, do we envision spam in visual form too? Could spam ever cross the boundaries of text and cross over to the realms of voice and video? Will spammers now begin recording personalized messages or will they use the silly sounding text-to-speech converters to do their job? And do we think I might ever get to 'hear' from Mr WagMy FatTail? [damn! I'd even considering buying what he has to sell with name sounding like that]
I for one, just cant wait for the next level of spam advertising. Seriously, there has to be intelligent life out there, [no offence O ye existing spammers,] just waiting for the opportune moment to start smart spamming, and when it does, I guess we're in for a hilarious riot! Until then, we'll have to live with those that have no name, but just the power to spam!... in text mode!
—Abd elAzeez
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The copyrighted [mini?] series titled Abd's takes, is a collection of humorous blog posts comprising of completely original but wierd/ obnoxious/ unfathomable/ and seldom-light-hearted tid-bits of humor that are a product of my own twisted mind.
Feel free to use them where-ever you want to, just don't forget to 'quote the author' (in simpler terms, mention me!)
If you don't, then bad things might happen to you; things like forgetting the punch-line when in the middle of an elaborately told joke, or meeting an audience-member who knows the answers to all of your original 'amusing-riddles'.
:-]
Sometime before this post was written, Fly, the flagship brand of Meridian Mobile, launched a mobile phone named Hummer in India (the very same place where this blog was launched from. hmm... seems to be quite a happening country :). This design has been styled after the Hummer SUV . What makes news this bloggable is the like our hero holds for the HUMMER (what font is the original logo made in BTW?)
at a modest 9K Indian rupees (yes, I KNOW that quoting current market values tend to make blog-posts seem outdated after a while. Nevertheless, one can only pretend that most readers will eventually be finding out how much it actually costs once they hit the road looking for it).
at a modest 9K Indian rupees (yes, I KNOW that quoting current market values tend to make blog-posts seem outdated after a while. Nevertheless, one can only pretend that most readers will eventually be finding out how much it actually costs once they hit the road looking for it).
