I’m thinking that there may be a market for a service that would improve spam subject lines, making them more appealing to prospective victims.
I get about 300 pieces of spam each day, and I have to scan through the ones that are caught by my spam filter, just to make sure I don’t miss the occasional legitimate email that gets shunted off to the trash, so I actually read all the subject lines. (Well, I can’t really read Russian, so I don’t bother with those, and I’m not corresponding with anyone in Chinese or Japanese at present, so those don’t merit much attention, either.)
Frankly, I’m just not impressed with the quality. Here are some examples of the kind of thing I’m talking about, from this evening’s batch:
Someone you know is acquiring improved because of this product
the dirty dishes, after
[inconveniencing] 76% off Vicodin. astronautics weed
cheap oem software shipping worldwide. feeblest proponent
Our company extend you the primo select soft
Vicodin - only now Ollie
Re: you mail
I mean, really… :roll: how can you expect to catch a lot of suckers with such lame bait? What my proposed service would do would be to create reusable text files of appealing, grammatically correct subject lines especially designed for spammers.
Does this sound like something that would have wide appeal and make me a lot of money? Would anyone else like to get in on the ground floor of this enterprise? I can accept Pay Pal, personal checks, and money orders.
Maybe you could develop some sort of syntax filter, to catch the most glaring irregularities. Then at least everything that passes through would be grammatical, like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.
I’m interested in some of that astronautics weed, Darwin, sounds like good stuff. But don’t bother with the primo select soft, the hard stuff is better.
In a previous job I wrote “marketing” copy–descriptions of books being offered in a book club. The headlines were changed to be “more appealing” by just about everyone who read it, and the list of people who had to approve it was quite long.
And in another marketing job–direct marketing this time, which is to say mailings going out to people who MIGHT be interested in the product–the major point was to write an enticing line on the outside of the envelope to just get the recipient to open it. If it got thrown in the trash unopened, they’d never buy the product.
So how can you get lured into buying medicine or Rolex knock-offs if you never read the e-mail?
M
PS–One of my favorite books is Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, first published in 1933. It’s a murder mystery in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, but I find the depiction of the advertising agency to be delightful. Miss Sayers worked in such an office, and it shows in the descriptions.
Fat chance you could cash them, because I’d shed my passivity in a heartbeat and throttle you to pieces with the biggeset heaviest whistle I could find, or a tire iron, if I can’t tell the diff.
