Now This Log

Tuesday, 15 January 2002 : "Spam qua spam"

A bit of spam received a few days ago. This would be amusing if it weren't so irritating:
BRAND NEW ANTI-SPAM TECHNOLOGY!

Detect & eliminate spam BEFORE it gets to your mail client! Tired of the hundreds of unsolicited commercial email (UCE) infiltrating you mailbox everyday? Now you can do something about it! Seek and Destroy all unwanted junk e-mail at the click of a button, BEFORE it reaches your mailbox! 

FEATURES:

* Connects to any pop3 server! Eliminates spam BEFORE it reaches your mailbox!
...etc., etc....
And a big dose of chutzpah at the end:
You are receiving this email because you purchased a product from us in the past, or downloaded software from one of our websites and agreed to allow us to send you offers.
No, no, I'm quite certain that I didn't, nor did all the other people at something@now*.com who were also in the 'to' field of your message, unless your sales team concentrated heavily on the 'n' domains for customers.

Irritating!


Replies: 1 comment so far

Add a comment of your own

(Hi, like your site.)

There is additional unspoken chutzpah as well:

"Give us your POP3 account username and password so we can DELE(te) or RETR(ieve) your mail from it directly without asking you first. We could also use it to send out lots of additional spam as you, but knowing us, we might not do that.

"Don't worry that this is probably also your FTP / shell / ISP account information, or that you might be sufficiently dumb such that most of your other online accounts use the same user and pass. We probably won't snoop around in your bank account or post unseemly messages as you on your favorite online forums."

Posted by James McMurry @ 01/16/2002 09:53AM est

Links, exploration and
synthesis from
Steve Bogart

Mug shot
photo by my wife
If you want to be e-mailed when there's new stuff here, say "add me."
Archives by week

January 2002
S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Older Archives:
2001 (Aug-present)
2001 (Jan-Aug)
2000 | 1999 | 1998

Medley/AllTooCozy
Entropy
Genehack
rc3.org
GirlHacker
LarkFarm

Search log since Aug. 2001:

Ye olde Amazon wish list
Powered By Greymatter

How's my HTML?
How's my CSS?

Home - Log - Services - Writing - Media - Links - About