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Tue Jan 02 08:20 (Sumana) Happy New Spam: Today's quote is from the middle of a spam, like a creamy filling:

Where we can somewhat fall in love with our stovepipe.

And passed along from Aaron Swartz:

you know how you want it ? as stable software!

Tue Jan 16 08:43 (Sumana) National Spam Writing Month: Good Omens (Pratchett & Gaiman) quote spotted in spam:

"So computers are tools of the devil?" thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.

And random text grabbing & generation gives me a new magical-realism/Stephenson/Magnolia plot!

Furthermore, a highly paid submarine goes to sleep, and the sheriff gives secret financial aid to a skinny cab driver.

When a graduated cylinder is incinerated, the sandwich gives secret financial aid to a miserly football team.

A mastadon near the inferiority complex, some somewhat incinerated bottle of beer, and a hardly snooty football team are what made America great!

Mon Jan 22 10:59 (Kevan) Stand Up and Clap Your Hands:

Fri Jan 26 14:49 (Sumana) Harry And The Spammers: Today, I got spam with quotes from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," "Around the World in 80 Days," and some work of philosophy that cites Socrates. Funny how a single set of two sentences from Rowling distinguishes itself.

Sun Feb 11 08:13 (Leonard):

The body of the email is great too. It's like a sales pitch written by the King of All Cosmos.

You're stupid man. buy viagra. maybe it will help you. oh, no. nothing helps you.

Tue Mar 20 07:13 (Sumana) "Snow" Repetition + "Arctic" = Meaning: I got a nice little poem-fragment spam under the title "Microsoft Windows Vista ready to download": 

Sculpting each tree to fit your ghostly form.
The weight of being born into exile is lifted.
The mortal architect had brought to life,
The earth beneath his feet, in its dark cape,
Are gliding toward me on the ice into
Dreaming time has reversed, I watch drowned snow
Or else, like us, sunk into some long gaze
For any part of them we can make out
As if your absence now concluded long ago.
The paths of childhood.
Seen. What you know is only manifest
the old men burnish stories of Yaz and the Babe
A kind of snow, which hesitates
Not daring to oppose
That neither the motionless farm couple trudging
To have been claimed by what we see of what
Sits at the limit of a kind of world
XXI. Flying in the Arctic
and the numbed yards will go back undercover.

Wed Mar 21 08:20 (Sumana) Saturday Night Palsy's Subtitle: "boogie invidious"

Tue Mar 27 11:30 (Kevan) Butter-Burning Machine:

Thu Apr 19 09:24 (Sumana) Web 2.Spam: Subject: [Unknown Tag *free* Please Fix] [Unknown Tag *porn* Please Fix] [Unknown Tag *access* Please Fix]!

In most folksonomies, we find ourselves stymied by minor divergences in tag names. The set of "scifi" and "sf" and "sci-fi" probably fits together (cf. blaaaah and blaaah) and the casual browser would rather their members converge to sit in one tag. But spam tags benefit from divergence. Ah, what we learn when QA takes a vacation.

If you don't take Man-Agra, you'll have the subject of today's other great spam:

manxiety

Thu Apr 26 04:58 (Brendan) Creepiest sender ever: "Doctor Candy."

Thu May 10 03:39 (Leonard): Oh Man My Cock is Hard

Some deviants get their kicks by sending spam.

Wed May 16 10:28 (Kevan) Viagra-Man:

Tue May 22 18:20 (Sumana) Truth Is Stranger Than Viagra: "From: Interweb iTechnologies"

Wed May 23 08:09 (Sumana) Just Another Day In the 21st Century: Today's spam includes a yo-mama-esque insult: "Your penis is smaller than the smallest cell phone."

Mon May 28 12:25 (Sumana) This snippet seems familiar...: It's from the short story "As a Bird Out of the Snare" by Dorothy Canfield.

The thought reminded him of his evening
   chores, and he set off for the barn with a harsh jubilation that it
   was almost the last time he would need to milk. How far, he wondered,
   could he go on that money? He hurried through his work and into the
   house to his old desk. The faded text-ornament stood on the top shelf,
   but he did not see it, as he hastily tumbled out all the time-tables
   and sailing-lists. The habit of looking at them with the yearning
   bitterness of unreconciled deprivation was still so strong on him that
   even as he handled them eagerly, he hated them for the associations of
   years of misery they brought back to him. Before he went into the
   house after his evening chores were done, he stopped for a moment and
   looked back at the cleft in the mountain wall through which the
   railroad left the valley. He had been looking longingly toward that
   door of escape all his life, and now he said good-by to it. Ah well,
   twant to be, he said, with an accent of weary finality; but then,
   suddenly out of the chill which oppressed his heart there sprang a
   last searing blast of astonished anguish. It was as if he realized for
   the first time all that had befallen him since the morning. He was
   racked by a horrified desolation that made his sturdy old body stagger
   as if under an unexpected blow. As he reeled he flung his arm about
   the pine tree and so stood for a time, shaking in a paroxysm which
   left him breathless when it passed.

I thought it might be Twain; I've seen it mixed with a sample from "The Awful German Language." Also today I got a few sentences from Stephen King's Misery. Looks pretty good. Who needs BookMooch, LibraryThing, or the friendly local librarian when we've got Project Gutenberg, OCR-happy scan fans, and spammers?

Tue May 29 09:57 (Sumana) "Students cheating insisting lying.": I am pleased to inform you that one of the best things that can happen to any Internet user is to be rewarded for spending money and time on the Internet.

Oh, no need to thank me.

I know this will come to you as a surprise because you do not know me.

If only spam were a surprise.

Also, today some spam had munged quotes from an interesting NYT story. Who needs del.icio.us?

Sun Jun 03 06:51 (Sumana) Earnestness Goes To Camp:

Sun Jun 10 16:51 (Brendan) "My name is ( ABD-AL-RAHMAN)": I got my first Iraqi Nigerian email today (or anyway my first that Thunderbird didn't eat before I saw it). It's a pretty obvious angle when I think about it. Are these something everybody's already seen, or a relatively new take?

Wed Jun 20 12:54 (Sumana) Sell The Sizzle, Not The Steak: More insults and insinuations about penises: the product will make your unit "so large you will be able to park a car on it." "Be bigger than your girlfriends ex with [product]." Speaking of your significant other: various female orifices will not be able to handle your unit in the post-product era! Right now, in contrast, it's "so thin you can put a ring on it instead of the finger." But, more inspirationally:

[Product] will give you the inspiration for a better life.

Do you want to possess the whole world? Try our [product] and you will be the master of the universe.

From another ad: Full, thick hardons..no more semls    What in the hell is a seml? Do I want to know?

Wed Jun 20 13:00 (Sumana) GMail Is Right Out: Excerpted from a sort of fake-personal-ad-phishing junk message I got this week:

Hello, Hans

I think we had correspondence a long time ago if it was not you I am sorry. If it was I could not answer you because my Mozilla mail manager was down for a long time and I could not fix it only with my friend's help I got the emails address out for me ..:)

Does it seem more believable for the spamee if it's Mozilla that messed up and not Outlook or Eudora? And Yahoo! Mail is even less believable. Like excuses for not turning in your homework or getting to work on time, spammer excuses have to evolve over time as we fix stupid little logistical problems; the advent of webmail, where this sort of mishap is much less likely, also means this spammer will have to switch fake excuses.

Also, in subject lines recently: Turbo penis, which led a friend to reminisce about those units back in the 90s that had the "turbo" button that lit up.

Sun Jul 01 05:16 (Brendan) A Gentle Hint: If you are trying to convince me that you are a bored 25 y.o. girl w/ pics 2 share, you may want to avoid using "From" names like Weldon, Lon and Perry.

Tue Jul 03 13:10 (Sumana) Very Creative Commons: I present to you some excerpts from a bit of spam I got that took, as its text, Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories. Subject: Psychohistorians HARI SELDON had held, his back upon the sensation of it was anything;

Enjoy.

Not touch the Anacreonian worlds: on a feverish part in the soul that you're going it won't work entirely and your last shipment. He was my philosophy of knowledge.

We have predicted the gold only Sermak, that: it opened it for thirty years now, achieved is a buzz of strength of generations of the masses, too important.

The age he caught its fall not at a missionary were kicked warmed put on the planet; will force field. They have been impossible aren't you. Aporat, grimly, I have eat fire flies caught his life motion and he said Bort?

And if they run my crimson and then looked up at the throne stiffed. Have nice of recognition of the ground slowly, the assassination, of Korell to ruin of seats, then you every known; since and HARI SELDON crisis; and Daribow?

Sermak viciously (a tall man)? The steady historical validity of factly, destiny of years. Do you the problem the second class psychologist enough to himself, in your a confession of the planet, seemed at the youthful spirits of their foreign policy to make them, from his Holy seat lip, and it's I'll have now since your bunch here at the other's treaty, is to kindle it once most of entirely different in ahchaeology, ah.

And irrevocable a question? Mallow's eyebrows lowered; and one yet.

One interesting thing here is how thoroughly Asimov's accessible prose gets wrecked. If it weren't for the proper nouns (and "psychohistory," which arguably deserves the same standing), I wouldn't have recognized it at all -- and unlike Rowling, Asimov in Foundation et al. doesn't have many memorable names.

This spam, then, gives us a glimpse into the alternate universe where James Joyce, or William Gibson, wrote Foundation. Come to think of it, the Foundation saga still has a few hundred years left to detail -- WG, want a crack at it?

Thu Jul 05 10:41 (Sumana) "I'm going to show you this, but keep it secret!": A subject line from my spam collection. I think it was Ben Franklin who said, "Three men may keep a secret, if two of them are spammers." Here are some of those secrets.

Did you know that 76% of girls prefer guys with a descent ramrod?

I live right near a hardware store - it must carry those. Let's go!

We bet it's not a secret for you, but the true secret is how you can ENLARGE your WEENIE safely and WITHOUT ANY RISK to amaze 100% of girls.

It will make your squib a real space rocket that will raise you up to the seventh sky of the sexual satisfaction!

ENLARGE my WEENIE? Classy. I bet I could find references to the seventh sky of the sexual satisfaction in Chinatown.

They work for up to 36 hours

...without a break, because they are terrified of losing in the first few episodes of Project Runway and being completely forgotten even in the DVD special features.

Now, my libido is back, and also my sex drive.

Does this person think that his libido was previously not the same thing as his sex drive?

twisted pit viper

Hey, there's no need for that kind of spite. I can understand why Laura questioned the authenticity of Jeffrey's work -- she'd never seen that kind of craftsmanship from him before, because they'd always worked on 2-day deadlines, so she didn't know he could do it. Would you really rather she'd bit her tongue and allowed what seemed like a breach of the rules to pass?

Thu Jul 05 10:48 (Sumana) Depressing, Poignant Spam:

Hi, my gentleman

You know, sometimes it happens that you are in a rush and you are afraid to be late and you think that you are the most important person in this world...but you will never be able to do the MOST important...

Maybe it is because you still don't know WHAT IS? most important for You? Maybe you know, but often the Most important changes over time? It is different at 20 than at 16, and than at 25 it changes even more?

The Most important for me in my life is Family, Love, Passion, Relationships with a beloved man. You can call it any name you wish, but the meaning remains the same. I want to love and to be loved...You now know that you can find me at [URL]

You know, sometimes you are afraid to sleep alone...
You know, sometimes you are afraid that you exist...
You know, sometimes it is just raining and cold...
You know, sometimes...
You know...

See you

Raquel

Just to leaven this: indeed, the three turning points in one's life occur at 16, 20, and 25. Raquel would like multiple relationships with her beloved man (simultaneous? sequential?). And he will never be able to do the most important thing in the world: give birth? live a day free of junk e-mail?

Mon Aug 06 08:06 (Kevan) NetHack spam: 

You bounce around trying to find a lead provider that is solid. 
You are skeptical of trying again. 
You still need a boost in business.
--more--
(via Raven Black)

Tue Aug 07 09:20 (Kevan) Candle-Ends:

Sun Aug 12 08:06 (Leonard) Citizen M142A9, Report To Municipal Comfort Station: Pulp sci-fi spam:

Sun Aug 12 10:38 (Brendan) halfhearted bodice ripper: "Oh Reynaldo," yawned Beatriz, "truly, your kisses set me aflame."

"Just a minute," said Reynaldo, mashing buttons, tongue through his teeth in concentration. "If I make this conversion, we go to the Super Bowl."

"I am sure your arch-rival Don Vicente could never match them," growls Beatriz.

"Fine," snaps Reynaldo. "Fine! Um, your body is the flame, my darling, and I am drawn like a moth to its doom, etcetera."

Beatriz taps away at the keyboard. "Okay!" she says. "Good. Now give me a euphemism for 'penis.'"

"Oh, just check your spam folder," grumbles Reynaldo, as the Patriots pile on.

Sat Sep 01 20:25 (Sumana) Not To Mention Quechup:

From: Coy Aaron
You know how if your discipline has "science" in its name, or your country has "Democratic," "People's," or "Republic" in its name, it isn't? Same with "Coy."

Subject: **EMAIL ID AWARD**
If only Stacy Umana hadn't taken sumana@[host].berkeley.edu!

Subject: Can you tell me what's wrong, and how we can fix it?
Surprisingly civilized. I wish more of the customer service email I've dealt with had taken this attitude.

Subject: Vista and other fresh software
Now this is the story all about how
Windows got flipped-turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute; just sit right there
I'll tell you 'bout Vista and other fresh software

Thu Sep 27 22:32 (Sumana) When Gillette Goes Obsequious: "The best a Sir can get"

Thu Sep 27 22:40 (Sumana) How Do They Cram All That Spam?:

Mon Oct 01 10:40 (Sumana) Subject: "parrot more nun": It's time to: Dive in the ocean of self indulgence with Canadian Health&Care Mall.

Fri Oct 05 01:06 (Kevan) Back to the Slaughterhouse:

Thu Oct 11 06:10 (Leonard) You know nothing of my work!:

LET:account,password,shop,did you forget?,are you forget?,why are are forget?,damn you forget}

Pill spam that parodies phishing spam. Possibly the first example of intra-spam genre parody.

This spam also includes the address http://{_clean_domains}

Sat Oct 13 11:51 (Brendan):

Wed Oct 17 19:32 (Brendan) The Prequel:

Tue Nov 20 15:19 (Kevan) NEVER BORING:

Fri Dec 07 08:01 (Sumana) VIEW WHAT WE GOT TO PROPOSE: Seed of a good rap there. Anyway, what follows is the least Texan email I've ever received.

Subject: I WILL HELP

Hello,

My Name is ( MRS.LUCY BOB), I am 75yrs old of age; I stay in Texas, USA. I am a good merchant; I have several industrial companies and good share in various banks in the world. I spend all my life on investment and corporate business. All the way I lost my husband and two beautiful kids in fatal accident that occur in November 5th 2003.I am a very greedy woman with all cost I don~Rt know much and care about people, since when I have an experience of my lovely ones I felt weak. I found it difficult to sleep and give rest.

Later in the year 2004 February I was sent a letter of medical check up, as my personal doctor testify that I have a lung cancer, which can easily take off my life soon. I found it uneasy to survive myself, because a lot of investment cannot be run and manage by me again. I quickly call up a pastor/prophet to give me positive thinking on this solution, as my adviser.

He minister to me to share my property, earth, to motherless baby/orphanage homes/people that need money for survivor both student that need money/ business woman and man for their investment for future rising. So therefore I am writing this letter to people who are really need help from me both student in college, to contact me urgently. Especially those people who found it so difficult in the area of money. Please contact me and stop weeping.

Probably let me know what you really need the money for, and if you can still help me to distribute money to nearest orphanages homes near your town. Now am so much with GOD, am now born again. May the lord bless you, as you reach me, please to remind you reply to ([address]) Please scammers and any act of fraudulent on Internet.

BEST REGARD
LUCY BOB

My favorite bits are the all-caps name, "I am a good merchant" (gets Leonard laughing with its mix of interactive-fiction "times are tough, sigh" and the PBS sponsorship tag for "The GOOD Cook!"), "Please contact me and stop weeping," "pastor/prophet," the fragmented last sentence that betrays the scam, and "I found it uneasy to survive myself."

Fri Dec 07 08:34 (Sumana) What is it with George Soros?: Why does so much of that random text in these messages have to do with financier and liberal George Soros? Also, who's the rather gifted copywriter whose scanning, rhyming verse on manhood enhancement landed in my spambox?

Fri Dec 14 06:26 (Leonard) Tales That Will Chill You:

Announcing the FIRST-EVER TALKING Thomas Kinkade collectible Story House! LISTEN as Thomas Kinkade reads aloud the beloved holiday poem, "The Night Before Christmas"! Watch as each impeccably sculpted room LIGHTS UP in turn as the classic story unfolds. Experience anew the delight of Christmas through Thomas Kinkade's gentle voice and his charming Victorian holiday artistry.

The voice is coming from inside the house!

Tue Dec 18 04:19 (Kevan) On Worm Web:

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[Main]

© 2003-2008 Sumana Harihareswara.