Tuesday, January 12, 2010

You've Got Spam

There was rejoicing in the JP HQ last night as at last the Compuserve / AOL Webmail finally decided to play ball and the 16 days of "temporary maintenance" (oh the irony) came to an end.

And was it worth it?

Well there was hundreds of offers for 80% off pharmaceuticals - probably made worse by some form of duplication, triplication or worse of messages when repairing the mailbox.

Then there were status update messages from the likes of eBay, Amazon, Facebook and two of the clubs I'm members of.

Then there were a couple of emails I'd heard about from other means, an email from Greg (but had posted a message on his blog anyhow).

And after that?

Hmm....

Oh yes, there were the test messages I sent myself to see if would get any warning messages.

So alas no messages from a Shopgirl :(

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry, but your 1st line instantly made my think Monty Python "and there was much rejoicing".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enSYlCEz5VI

Isn't it odd how spam is so focused on saving $$ on pharmaceuticals? If I needed/wanted/used any of these things, would I really want to buy them from some random emailer than can't spell half the words correctly?

You need to make the switch to Gmail - their spam filter is fantastic.

Glad to hear you're back online.

JP said...

Very good!

Much rejoicing indeed. I have a gmail account as well and one reason the outage wasn't as bad as might have been is that friends and family have mostly been using that.

Carol Anne said...

I, too, have a gmail account that I use for the really important stuff.

What's odd about the spam that I get at my other account is just how poorly targeted it is. I don't need products guaranteed to enhance my male attributes. I don't feel an urge to make women happy in bed. It leaves me wondering ... are men more likely to fall for spam, and therefore most spam is aimed at men? Or is there something that causes the spammers to believe that I am male?

JP said...

Spam is by its nature blasted out without consideration as the recipient.

But what is indeed scary is that it must work and some people must reply!

Carol Anne said...

If spam were truly equal-opportunity, then I should be getting an equal number of spams offering to increase the size of my "female attributes" and to make men happy in bed. I think men are just more likely to respond to spam, and so those are the ones that proliferate.

Pat said...

Historically, more men and boys have been on the internet. The trend has been changing, but spammers may be slow learners.