Brunch Unlovable

Spam.

We all get spam.

It doesn’t matter what kind of spam filter you use, no matter how many message rules you set up in Outlook…you still get spam.

I currently have four email addresses. My main, private one, given out only to friends and family. The Yahoo account I set up purely for this blog. The Gmail account I set up in order to replace the Yahoo account (that I haven’t changed the link on here for yet), and last but by no means least, the Hotmail account I set up when I was 14, that gets a few hundred spam emails per day, that I keep alive purely to have an email address that I can use when I want to sign up for a forum or something, so my main account doesn’t get spammed.

However, the latest spamming ‘trick’ I’ve become a victim to is really pissing me off.

You see, the reason people bother to send spam is that it’s free, and you can reach a few million people in a few seconds. If you send out 5 million spam emails, and only half of one percent of the people it reaches actually but something from you, that’s still twenty five thousand sales.

However, this latest thing gets me mad because it’s just so pointless.

Currently, my Yahoo account is getting something like 15 emails a day. Each email is the same, basically being ‘top secret inside info’ on the latest stock tips, stocks I should watch and invest heavily in as soon as possible.

Alarm Bell #1:

These are supposed to be top secret stock tips. So why the hell are they being mass-emailed to complete and total strangers? Isn’t the idea supposed to be that if you have a good stock tip, you keep it on the ‘down low’, because a flood of buyers will push the prices up, meaning you can’t buy low and sell for the much higher price when the news comes out and prices jump?

However, the thing that really makes me mad at the sheer stupidity of this is the way these stock tips are delivered.

You see, I get 15 of these a day. If these emails all came from the same address and actually had ‘stock tip’ as the subject, once I’d had a full frontal lobotomy, I might actually think the things where genuine.

Instead, each email comes from a different person. (Well, actually they don’t, but it’s meant to look like they are). The subject line has nothing to do with stocks or shares. The subject is obviously plucked randomly by a computer from a dictionary.

The idea behind this is that if you block a particular sender, or all emails with a particular set of words in the subject line, the emails will still get through. Of course, if you have half a brain-cell, and aren’t an AOL subscriber, you know to simply block all emails from that particular domain.

However, my point is, who the hell would believe a stock tip given to you by a random person, when the subject line obviously has nothing to do with the subject?

Here are a few examples of the emails I got today alone:

Sally Lawson : Sitter
Annabel Frost : Tuition Troubleshooter
Dorothy White : Noun Until
Tobias Christian : Gulf
Cecil Foley : Brunch Unlovable
Louie Daniel : Royal

All of them telling me to “Invest Immediately” and “Watch these like a hawk”

Well, here’s my reply:

Why don’t you just fuck off and leave me alone, you complete and utter retard.

You see, I’m not an idiot, and that qualifies me to not take stock market advice from a guy named Cecil Foley, who thinks that “Brunch Unlovable” is an accurate description for a stock tip.

Ok, here’s what I suggest. For the next two weeks, every time you get a piece of junk email, look closely at the message header, find out where it actually came from, and ‘Bulk Email’ them back.

I don’t know, send them about a quarter million copies of an advertisement where, for this week only, they can get a right royal ass-kicking for the low, low price of just ten dollars.

I mean, it’s legal to send unsolicited ads through email right?

Let’s give the bastards a taste of their own medicine.

(Oh, and don’t forget to attach the 500mb ‘promotional video’ in each email.)