No, not the processed, formed “meat” product, but the stuff in your inbox. We all get it and most of it gets thrown into your spam folder, never to be seen. Every once and awhile, an email will sneak past and I’ll receive notification of my $1M inheritance from my distant relative in Nigeria or the $1K Walmart gift card that I won.
Whenever I get one of these types of emails, I usually read it. I don’t read it because I think it might be true, I like to see how creative they are in trying to get me to give them my information. Unfortunately, within the first line or two of the email, the grammar or run-on sentences prevent me from reading the whole thing. For example:
Please excuse me for invading into your privacy through this medium. However I wish to convey a very important message which in the long run will be conjointly beneficial to us.
I wonder how much money they would pay me to make the spam emails sound legit? I guess that would be kind of illegal nor am I’m not trying to give anyone ideas. Obviously people do click on those links and give away their personal information or they wouldn’t still be sending out the emails. But come on! Hire an editor or a proofreader! A couple of years ago I replied to one of the inheritance emails and I called them out on all of the grammatical errors and misspelled words. Yep, I’m an idiot.
Today I received an email first. I’m not sure if someone did this to me or it’s a simple hack job, but it made me laugh. Now, let me be clear. This one, single occurrence made me laugh. If it happens even one more time, I’m going to get pissed. Don’t take this as an open invitation to all you hackers! This is the email I got today:
Hello amy*****@*****.com,
We have received your request to join the WatchHottWebcamsx4mJ
group hosted by Yahoo! Groups, a free, easy-to-use community service.
This request will expire in 7 days.
TO BECOME A MEMBER OF THE GROUP:
1) Go to the Yahoo! Groups site by clicking on this link:
http://groups.yahoo.com…..
(If clicking doesn’t work, “Cut” and “Paste” the line above into your
Web browser’s address bar.)
-OR-
2) REPLY to this email by clicking “Reply” and then “Send”
in your email program
If you did not request, or do not want, a membership in the
WatchHottWebcamsx4mJ group, please accept our apologies
and ignore this message.
Regards,
Yahoo! Groups Customer Care
It doesn’t say what type of group this is, but I’m pretty perceptive and I think it’s safe to say that this is dirty. I’m kidding – of course it’s dirty! You can’t spell “hot” with two t’s and have it not be absolutely filthy! I think I’m going to pass on this membership. I think my speed is probably something with only one “t”.
10:02 
What was that URL again..? 😛
Okay, you asked for some useless geek info with this post…
1) 95% of all email sent every day is positively identified as spam and never reaches your inbox
2) There was a study done a few years back where a university set up a fake pharmaceutical company website and sent out millions of spam emails. When you clicked on the link, it would take you to a website where you could order products, however, when you clicked on the button to buy the products, it would give some kind of error. They really didn’t want to scam anyone, they just wanted to see how many people would be willing to buy the products and how much money they could make as a result. Even though the number of people who visited the website was something like 1 in a hundred thousand, they estimated they could have easily made a million dollars a year by scamming people.
3) Don’t reply to those emails. It just tells the spammers they have a valid email address and they’ll sell it on
4) Don’t publish your email online (or try to avoid it) – the more places you have your email address, the more spam you’ll get.
5) Spam is great with pickle in a sandwich.
Enjoy!
Very interesting! I don’t doubt the 95% stat – I cleared out my spam folder yesterday and I already have 135 messages in there. I know I should never reply to a spam email – I was in a mood! And you will never convince me to eat spam. Yuck!!
Hey, don’t knock it til you try the spam sushi in Hawaii. Yummy.