Comedy Central In My Spam Folder
For reasons I can't entirely explain, I seem to pay a lot of attention to the spam folder in my email. I have an insatiable desire to find false positives, and as a result I spend a lot of time looking at the messages that get past my slam-dunk filters.
For the most part, reading through spam subject lines is breathtakingly tedious - hundreds of intentionally mistyped variations on stock scams, drugs for erectile dysfunction, and all the usual phishing suspects.
Spammers Step It Up
In the month of August, though, I actually found that I have to tip my hat to a spam campaign. A nice series of spam emails found its way into my folder, all of which were prefixed with something along the lines of CNN Breaking News. A representative list of these headlines is shown here:
- John McCain Selects Laura Bush As His Vice President
- Hillary Clinton Gets Night Job - msnbc.com:
- Nazi Toddlers Ruined My Birthday
- Paris Hilton Initially Denies Having Inverted Nipples
- McCain And Bush To Dance In Puppet Show
- Paris Hilton To Operate New Atom Smasher
- John McCain Eats A Bug
- Teenage Girl obviously Having Affair With Bat
- [audio] Church Group Offers Homosexual New Life In Closet
- John McCain Kicks Lilly Ledbetter In The Crotch
- Nation Morns The Tragic Loss Of Britney Spears
- Osama Bin Laden caught finally
- Oprah found sleeping the streets
- Bulgarian diplomat arrested with 0.4kg of plutonium
- Britney found hanged in locker room
- 6 Ways Airlines Could Make Some Serious Money of You
- What Annoyed Us About The Olympic Opening Ceremony
- Favre gets unconditional reverse deactivation restriction
- Four Horseman of the Apocalypse Split; ‘Pestilence to go Solo'
- Cranberries CD Cures Woman's Urinary Tract Infection
- McCain Endorses Bush For 3rd Term
- Black Activists Line Up To Take Swipe At Obama
- Scientist Prepare to Colonize Redneck Area
- Mary-Kate Olsen implicated in Heath Ledger's death
I don't know about you, but I'd read just about any one of these articles if it were authentic! If these are being generated by a program, I'm impressed. If they're human in origin, the guy/gal needs to get a new career writing for the tabloids. I mean, some of these are pretty brilliant. The Four Horseman split up? Cranberries CDs cure UTIs? Awesome!
