Mmmm, spam

Spam cracks me up.

It used to drive me absolutely nuts, but since the good people at Gmail have about a 99.5% success rate at diverting spam from my inbox, it has become a source of great amusement.

It just kills me that there's somebody out there who thinks that if they send me an email with the subject line of "St0kkMarrkett Picks", I'm going to take their investment advice. Or that I'm going to buy prescription drugs from a message titled "test VAsLLtUM" or "Re: the mendtfcations".

Then of course, there's the random name generators. Senders like "Allegiances M. Overprint," "Godless J. Distinct," and "Hippolyte Manrique."

Personalizations are a nice touch, except when the spam software mismatches names. "Heya Zimoko, it's been a while." Yeah, I haven't been called Zimoko since a couple of reincarnations ago.

Then you have messages that are so garbled, in some attempt to fool the spam filters, that they are nearly unintelligable: "De k ar Ho b me Ow u ne a r , Your cr b edi q t doesn't matter to us ! Re x fi w nan x ce …". I've got one with a subject line of "steele orb may cheap". Yeah, I'll get right on that...

I don't know which is worse - that there are people out there sitting in front of their computers, thinking that this is an effective way to earn a little extra cash, or that it probably is and effective way to earn a little extra cash.

[In case you're wondering, all of the examples here were actually found in my Spam folder.]