The tomato that ate Kayak Woman
Tomato Giant. Men’s Health. Shamwow. Snuggie. I can guess that Men’s Health is just the latest incarnation of the kind of spam that once prompted my friend Paula (may she rest in peace*) to state that she had already grown her p*n#s innumerable times and they might as well quit emailing her about it. Shamwow? Some kind of paper towel? Ho-hum. Snuggie? I’m told it’s a blanket-like-thing that you *wear*. It sounds HOT to me! Even on the days that the old escalator has dumped us down into the subzero temperatures of the Great White Northern winter. Or spring. Or fall. Or whatever. I would be struggling to get out of a snuggie in short order. Tomato Giant… Hmmm. I just do not know. I will guess that it has something to do with growing trenormous tomatoes? But I don’t know. Because I DELETE spam email messages without reading them! Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
I figured out a long, long time ago that no matter what you do, you cannot beat the spammers. Spam filters? Ho-hum. Nobody can block a dedicated spammer, at least not forever. The spammers set up automated systems that use random number generating functions to tweak each message just a bit. A different string of garbage characters in the subject. A slightly different image in the message body. A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT SENDER EMAIL!** The spam filter can block senders to its heart’s content and the spammer will just sit there laughing, watching another billion spam emails launch with slightly tweaked details. Or more likely, the spammer just lets his lackeys (or bots) do the dirty work. He is hanging around down in the Carribean with whatever bank vice president threw my stock into the toilet.
What kind of spam do you get? How do you deal with it? Do you let it get under your skin? Honestly, door-to-door and telephone solicitors are more annoying to me than spam email.
*My friend Paula died way too early in December of 2004. We soldiered together as volunteers in one of the most disorganized organizations there ever was. We were great email buddies and her emails would often cause me to fall off my precarious rolling computer chair onto the floor, laughing hysterically. I still miss her…
**Disclaimer: This is a highly-simplified and hypothetical spam-generating algorithm. I don’t know *exactly* how various spammers generate their spam but I DO know a bit about functions that generate random numbers and I know how to incorporate them into computer programs and I can use my imagination from there.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
yeah, well, the latest/greatest method for getting around my junk-mail rules is who(what)ever is creating the “Men’s Health” (HTML body – also a way around filters) seems to be using the recipient’s email address an alias to “hide” the sender’s true address.
So, of course, “bouncing” the email doesn’t accomplish anything useful. >: P
March 25th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
I have to admit I do not get too much spam.
For all of the grief that aol gets, it does OK with this tiem.
I think I get more spam at work.
And I do not open it – ever.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Knock on wood, but I haven’t been receiving much spam lately — except from online companies that I’ve done business with in the past. They are relentless with their daily email promotions. I guess that’s not officially considered as spam, though — I just have them automatically sent to my junk folder. There for a while I was getting a LOT of spam in the comments section of my blog. Now THAT was aggravating! My blog host has improved in filtering those, thankfully!
March 27th, 2009 at 9:52 am
I’m glad that the picture was NOT a zombie tomato that you found at the back of the refrigerator! Do you remember that really bad movie, “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”? It came out after “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, and I think it was hoping for the same campy vibe.