This piece of Spam I got this morning was amusing for a couple of reasons.
Hey you,
I haven’t spoken to you since high school. I guess I was just a little shy then and I don’t remember if you would remember me. But I ran into some of the guys we went to high school with and they said you were a Wildcat now. Good for you.
Well, the reason I’m writing is because I’ve kinda always had a crush on you. I wanted to see if there was any way I could get a second chance of getting to know you better.
Anyway, a bunch of my girlfriends and I just got on 5050 Dating <–just click on that to meet up.
You’ve got to come up there. It is pretty wild & there are a few things I’ve got to tell you. Who knows, maybe we’ll hit it off this time and next time you come in town we can get together and I can show you a good time. I look forward to catching up. See ya soon!
Jenny:)
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8.
First was its sheer stupidity. It came to my work address at UK; they were probably trying to target students. Even so, the pitch to sign up on some website (presumably for some amount of money) to get in touch with Jenny who had a crush on me in high school is a little ludicrous. Do they really think I’ve killed so many brain cells that I would think Jenny really exists and I’ve just forgotten her? Or maybe they think I’ll remember some Jenny and think she’s the one.
I guess that considering the extremely low response rate spammers expect, maybe that’s not so unreasonable. The chances that one of the thousands(?) of people who got this have fond lustful memories of some Jenny and respond are probably not much lower than the usual spam response rate.
But what made it really funny was that it was sent via Micro$haft’s Hotmail service. And, like many other free mail services, it tacks on an advertisement to all outgoing mail. In this case, the ad suggests I should sign up for M$N because of their advanced spam protection. So does that mean if I pay Bill Gates enough, he’ll protect me from his other customers? Was this whole thing concocted by Bill to persuade me I need his anti-spam protection?