Curse

samarium · Jul 13, 2005, 06:02 PM // 18:02

Spam. It used to be a legitimate means to advertise a product, but lately, it's just become inane.

I mean, we don't like advertisements to begin with - we always get up when the commercials come on and go get a snack or whatever. Doubly so for advertisements that get shoved in our faces; a la e-mail.

We've come up with more and more complex ways of blocking these irritating messages: pattern-recognition filters, sender filters, net block filters, heuristic and Bayesian filters, all designed to identify spam before the recipient can see it. It seems like the only way around this is to obfuscate the subject and content of your message until it loses all meaning.

But with the paranoia spreading about e-mail virii and phishing, your average user (even the 'computer-illiterate' ones) is terrified of opening unfamiliar e-mail for fear of their personal lives being spirited away like so many dragon-bait virgins.

My point is this:

Are there really people out there who open e-mail with subjects like "Is ore slip nine"?!

And once they open it, and see a huge mess of unintelligible words like p3n'i"s and \/1A[gr=a, do they still click the links and buy this crap?

If I ever have the chance to meet one, I'm going to beat him or her about the head and shoulders and ask, "ARE YOU F*CKING INSANE?!?"

Please share stories of crazy unintelligible crap. I love the stuff people will do to get around spam filters, entirely losing sight of their original intention.

-sam

Shadowdaemon · Jul 13, 2005, 07:23 PM // 19:23

ive opened one or two, because the random words threw something together that looked important, of course once i saw the whole thing was gibberish, i deleted it

chalt2 · Jul 13, 2005, 07:35 PM // 19:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by samarium

If I ever have the chance to meet one, I'm going to beat him or her about the head and shoulders and ask, "ARE YOU F*CKING INSANE?!?"

Please share stories of crazy unintelligible crap. I love the stuff people will do to get around spam filters, entirely losing sight of their original intention.

-sam

Here, here, when you catch one shout out so the people around can come and take a couple of shots, I know I'd even pay good money for the privilege!