I Heart Spam

Posted by admin on August 10th, 2007 in Internet

When you got your first piece of spam email, which for me was so far back they hadn’t come up with a name for it yet, you probably got really confused. Maybe it was for porn, maybe it was some mass emailing “advertising” they used to do back in the old days telling you about an awesome new website, back when people gave a shit. The point is, you read it. When the next 1,000 showed up, you probably wondered where the fuck it was coming from, read a few, maybe you even clicked on a link or two in the emails.

When the next 15,000 spam emails showed up, you began the now more than ten year tradition of “dealing with it.” You scan your inbox for the shit, delete or move it, and get on with your life. Once in a while, one will trick you with a well-picked name or subject line, you scan it for half a second before deleting it, muttering under your breath. Maybe you spent a little time being vigilant about reporting every single one to a vague authority on the issue. Maybe they’re just littering your inbox right now. Maybe you had to abandon an email address because the spam got too heavy, and you’re gonna do your new address the right way, letting nothing get through.

When it comes down to it, it affects us all. It’s a force of nature, we plan ahead to deal with it, or we trudge through quickly as you would any other obstacle. You might even once in a while remark to a friend, spouse, or co-worker, “Spam’s been heavy lately.” As if it were like a heatwave to be reported on the news. In the future, it might even get some time on the nightly news, I can see it now, “Spam’s always heavy this time of the month, here’s some keywords to filter and addresses to blacklist that should save you and your loved ones some time.” Smug co-anchors will make wry comments about a particularly outstanding piece of spam they got the other day. “What’ll they think of next?”

But there’s something about spam that for a long time I couldn’t quite place my finger on. I’ve never been the type to delete a large group of something without taking a look here and there. Every day, about 300 spam emails pour into my mailbox, the accumulation of a few email addresses that get auto-forwarded to my account. Every day, I check through and do a cleaning session, about 10 spam in a day make it to my inbox, the rest are automatically sent to a Spam folder. I pick out and report the bold few that got through. I’ve learned begrudgingly to check my spam folder for false positives after once finding a few month-old job offers in there after a vacation. About once a week, I’ll find one, making the task something I don’t expect to give up for a while. I’ve been doing this for about a year, a daily check-up on my spam folder, scanning the names and subject lines for anything familiar.

Then something interesting happened. It started when I began seeing the same spam over and over, I’d begin seeing patterns in some of the subject lines. “Here’s another ‘MyBFsPenisTooBig’ one.” or “CanadianPharmacy hit every single one of my emails three times today, must be a busy season for them.” I began to enjoy some of the patterns and variations in the names and subject lines. There was an evolution over a few months where “My penis makes the ladies happy!” turned into “My penis pops out during sex!” and eventually became “My guys penis pops out when he goes into my mouth! It’s too big,”

It’s funny to think about how the writer of the subject line kept trying and refining slight variations, got rid of ones that weren’t working, then did variations of the more successful ones. He went from first person male perspective with a positive declaration to second person female perspective with hyperbole, graphic visual that specified the type of sex, and negative declaration that it was “too big.” This is what got people clicking. Nobody gives a shit about some guy making people happy, people got interested when some poor girl who gives blow jobs had a major dilemma on her hands. The only way to get in a position to help that poor girl is to click on that damn email, and by God, a relevant amount of the world does just that every day.

Because, in reality, this is what people click on, this is what people are interested in. Do you want to find out what the hopes and dreams of the email-using world are? Look at successful spam. People want strong ejaculations, giant penises, cheap software, fair-priced pharmaceuticals, and to keep their financial accounts in good order. Once in a while, we dream a little and hope that all our hard work will pay off and some distant acquaintance will have recommended us to a Nigerian banker to be steward of a small fortune. We wonder about whether we can make a living working from home, or get affordable higher education. We hope to get emails from prominent-sounding people such as Maximillian Penn and Evan Longoria. We hope to get greeting cards and emails from friends and neighbors whose first names may be James, Betty, Scott, or Nebedikt.

Recently, every morning I open my spam folder, and it’s not with a “Harumph” but instead with a bit of glee. What new mass-demanded product will have turned to spam emailing today? How realistic can those fake Ebay emails actually look, and how do they do that? (They’ve become surprisingly sophisticated since I first started receiving them about 5 years ago.) Every morning, I get a large chunk of free genuine entertainment hoping to peak my interest with any manner of ridiculous wording and spelling. It’s a little mental game to try and figure out if some of them are fake or not. “Would the Christine I know ever send me an email with the subject line ‘Re: Take a look’, and if so, could it be important enough to risk opening what would otherwise be a clever ruse for attention?”

The mental gymnastics one goes through are a little brainteaser, warming you up for the day to come, hitting you with randomness that breaks you out of your mental routines and forces you to question your assumptions. In many ways, this is the closest most of us get on a daily basis to a sort of seedy underworld in which we must always be on guard, alert to dangers and possible tricks. If we bypass a rather tricky spam email, we think “Any lesser person would’ve fallen for that, I’ve accomplished a level of sophistication that can outsmart someone out there who openly wants to trick me.” In our own way, we’re the sentinels and warriors of our tiny email inboxes, especially when it comes to spam that hopes to trick you, ones that ask you to download viruses or “phish” for your personal information. Like James Bond, we’re always in control, but always in danger, some openly hostile nemesis out there hopes to foil our plans and gain access to our many secrets. Every time someone tries to trick us into betraying our secret usernames and passwords, it reminds us that we actually have secrets that are of value, and that we hopefully will be able to guard from whatever tricks they come up with next.