Saturday, January 21, 2012

If it's Worth Doing, it's Worth Doing Well!

Readers of these sporadic chronicles know that I am a fan of well-done, creative spam, as well as a harsh critic of slipshod, half-baked spam.

Two fairly recent examples of spam that could have been so much more:



Two minutes on the United States Postal Service’s website could produce a copy of the USPS logo, the addition of which would have given this spam some much needed verisimilitude.

But it seems unlikely that as much as two minutes was spent on developing this message. How could it be that so many people sent packages on January 11 that could not be delivered because of an erroneous address? (And see my previous post in re the BCC field.) Why would I need to print a “shipment label" and collect the package at their unspecified “office"? Why wouldn’t they simply return the package to me as undeliverable?

Oh, yeah—and why the hell would the postal service be sending me e-mail, considering that e-mail is popularly considered to be a cause of the postal service’s recent financial crisis?



To appreciate sSpam requires a certain suspension of disbelief, so let us for a moment sent aside the fact that I don’t even know what an “ACH transfer" is, let alone have instigated one. And let’s ignore the likely fact that e-mail purportedly from NACHA would most likely indicate same in the sender’s field, not just “Dick Richmond." And we’ll grimace a little and try not to think about how spending a couple of seconds at NACHA’s website would have produced a company logo (see above in re verisimilitude). Just set all of that aside, and focus your attention on the link that the spammers wish me to activate for whatever nefarious purpose they may have in mind.

unclewillysfamily.com.

Yeah. That sounds like a URL that the Electronic Payments Association would use. unclewillysfamily.com.

I suppose that would be Dick Richmond’s Uncle Willy.

Really, does no one take any pride in his work anymore?

And This Is Why God Gave Us the BCC Field

The header from e-mail that arrived this past week. I get a lot of e-mail from this sender, and it always begins the same:


Naturally, a distressing number of recipients choose to reply to these messages by clicking “reply all,” generating messages of staggering length until you get to the latest entry, which generally is something like, “Do you still need help with that?”

Similarly, a distressing number of e-mailers out there seem not to know how to un-select their caps lock key.

How long has e-mail been around by now?