I don’t get spam.
Or, more correctly, I don’t understand spam…I sure as hell get it.
I’ve been around the internet for a fair amount of time. Not since the very very beginning, but damn near. I was on Pine doing email back in the day. I remember Compuserve and when AOL actually was something interesting. I remember Cindy Margolis being downloaded in excruciatingly low dial-up speeds. I don’t, however, remember when I started getting spam.
I don’t remember it back in college, when email was still entirely text-based and on Pine or similar. I had my first web-page in college, incidentally. It was an awful one page scrolling affair that had this really horrid purple lava liquid kinda something background and just had pictures of fighter jets on it. It was…not good. My second, third, and fourth websites weren’t especially better, and I have no idea where I’m at now on my 6th or 7th.
I may have started getting spam towards the end of college when Microsoft Outlook Express started becoming the thing, and then I probably was well-versed by the time my first “real” job at Lockheed Martin happened.
I don’t recall ever being drawn-in by spam…they being so incredibly obvious. Do I really think it’s a good idea to write a check to a Nigerian prince so that he can move money offshore and give me a cut? Well, it’s a GREAT idea, actually, I just ain’t gonna fall for it…has anyone ever?
Spam is no longer even trying to be clever in email anymore. GET A BIGGER PENIS is about as subtle as it gets now. It’s really more like mass marketing and advertising through junk mail (the literal real-world kind) instead of spam designed to trick you. Yes, I want a a bigger penis, therefore I will click on whatever link to member enlargement pills you are associated with because I generally do want to improve my manliness. Easy.
Do spam programmers even bother with viruses anymore? Hasn’t everyone figured out what a huge waste of time that is, yet? Unless it’s for awesome cloak and dagger espionage reasons, viruses are just dumb these days. Oh no, you temporarily crippled one of my 5 computers. Whatever, build a model plane, fly a kite, rid your kid’s tricycle, anything…just get a life.
I get a lot of spam on my comments for this website. They’re clearly automated trollers as I get so few visitors to my site in the first place. But they don’t even try, and that bugs me. If you’re sophisticated to write the software that makes comment spamming possible, why wouldn’t you also be smart enough to maybe check your damn grammar? At least a little? For instance, today I saw this:
It is a pity, that now I can not express – there is no free time. I will be released – I will necessarily express the opinion.
OK! Super! So…what now? Have a little pride in your work, won’t you? Easily deleting stuff like this is way too easy to be even inconvenient anymore…therefore you (spammer) have achieved nothing. Save for this post. Print it out, hang it in your mom’s “activity room” where you still live to “help out”.