TheBanyanTree: spam wham

[Mike Pingleton]

It's 2:15 PM my time and I have received thirty nine pieces of spam since 7 
AM.  Must be the big rush before the holiday.  Fortunately I sit behind a 
good spam wall, which evaluates all messages for 'spamosity'.  It tags the 
header field of any messages that accumulate sufficient 'spam points', and 
then my mail reader has a filter that dumps them all into the trash. 

Peeking at the 39 messages - they run the gamut.  Septic Tank Problems?  
On-Line Degrees?  Auto-Clean Your Pool With This Little Device.  Affordable 
Health Care.  Payday Loans.  Mortgage Refinance.  Need A Green Card?  Get 
Harry Potter Books For Free! (this came from Harry Potter himself; perhaps an 
owl will deliver it?)  We're Looking For 100 People To Make Rich.  Speak A 
New Language In Two Weeks (sorry, Tagalog and Sindarin not available). Spam 
Protection Software (!)

Then there are the more personal ones, offering to lengthen and/or thicken 
certain body parts.  Can My Wife Help Stimulate Your Love Life?  You Are The 
One And Only.  Order Viagra On Line.  

I really like the ones from people who apparently slept through grammar - Your 
Underpaid.  The names of the senders can get interesting.  Monica T. Butts.  
Exie Wootton.  Casey Corona.  Fuzzyfish and Pool Devil.  The abovementioned 
Harry Potter.  Les Johnson (I'll leave that one to your imagination).

And the Nigerians.  Always the Nigerians.  I can't see them, but I know 
they're out there, just beyond the fire's light.  They want my help.  
Urgently.  Privately.  Nigerians have more money tied up in banks than the 
rest of the world combined, and nobody can get their hands on it.  Only I can 
help them.  Nigeria also has more plane crashes than anyone else; on one 
plane alone, every passenger had eight to ten million dollars stashed in the 
bank. 

Whoah, two more messages arrived while I ranted.  Hair Growth Secret Revealed 
and Undecipherable Chinese Characters.

Perhaps there's a message in all these spammy entrails, if only I knew how to 
divine it.  Maybe I'll write a pattern matching program that will generate an 
I Ching hexagram from each subject line - that way, Bored Horny Housewives 
might actually carry some useful meaning or portent.

yours from the Electronic Frontier,
Mike