Spam of the Day

Along with all the spam I’ve received today came one that stuck out. It is an email so removed from reality that I had to look a little deeper:

Our recent view shows that it needs usual of only 1.7

drinkings to make a katzenjammer. But my tablets

services you avoid hang-overs and awaken feeling immense from head

to belly and everyplace additional.

Push to read more

The ‘push to read’ line was an actual link in this spam which I will not publish here.

I wanted to know what all this meant so I clicked (all my patches are in and I am not using Internet Explorer making it a lot less risky to click away). The ad page that came up, for a hangover remedy, was in perfect English. Whether it’s a legitimate product or not is for others to decide. Since I don’t drink, I’m not in the target audience.

I’m trying to figure this out, but it makes no sense on a number of different levels. The email might be avoiding certain words to try and evade filtering (though I did pluck this from my spam filtered mail). Or maybe it was written by someone who is machine translating another language to English and ended up with words that literally mean what was originally written – just not in this context.

This goes to point out another one of the problems for all of us caused by spam. In any legitimate business setting, no one could afford to advertise this poorly. With spam, where the cost is actually born by the people who read your mail and those who provide them with mail service, it is cheaper to just send than to spend the money to send effectively.

I have yet to see any proposed solution to spam that I think will work.