Heaneyland!

Spam I Am

I do enjoy spammers' sad little attempts to get their ads past spam filters, or at least to get my attention in that brief window of time when I open my bulk mail folder to make sure that nothing important actually got stuck in it.

Now, you may or may not know that one thing spam filters do is look for words that commonly appear in spam, so one way spammers attempt to get around that is by deliberately misspelling words. This means that instead of having a subject line of "humongous breasts" setting off the spam filters, you'll have, say, a subject line of "hugHm0ngggus br3aSt5", which I would naturally assume is an e-mail from one of my relatives. As for the other tactics, a common technique to try to catch my attention is to stick my name in the subject line ("FRANCIS get 7 complimentary panties"). So if you combine these techniques in a really ham-handed way, here is the subject line you might come up with:

EUGENE , Gët ä largër Pënis!

I love their blind faith that my name is Eugene, and the way "Get a larger Penis" suddenly seems like the name of an '80s hair metal band once you add all the umlauts. Classic. Kudos to you, ggewg@netscape.net!

Posted by Francis at 09:32 PM