I know, I know, I’ve been posting a lot about junk mail lately. Hey, it’s not as if much has been going on in my life that’s worthy of note, so I figure I might rant about the mess that clogs my inbox every morning. Admittedly, the spam problem is made even worse by that stupid MyDoom virus. Although I have a server-side filter on my zone38.net mail accounts set up to block the virus based on certain strings found therein (see this F-Secure virus profile for the regular expressions to use), I still have addresses at other providers that are getting hit by it several times a day, and in addition I have to deal with the delivery failure notifications that are getting sent back to an innocent third party who happened to be in someone else’s address book.
Anyway, I found a couple of amusing spam-related weblogs while I was searching for posts about MyDoom-related annoyances. Because these involve subject lines found in actual spam, there are bound to be occasional entries that are in somewhat questionable taste, but in all honesty, I’ve seen far worse spam subjects in my own inbox than are mentioned on either of these sites…
First off is Kristin Thomas’ Spam Poetry, a reasonably successful attempt to assemble random quotations from the subject lines of junk e-mail into somewhat coherent verse. A bizarre idea, to be sure, but the results are actually quite interesting to read.
If poetry isn’t quite your thing, you might enjoy Good Things from Spam, an attempt to make sense of– and snarky comments about– the often incoherent and occasionally nonsensical non-sequiturs that are frequently found in the subjects of spam. Many of the comments on this site literally had me laughing out loud; if your sense of humor is anything like mine, you’ll probably find it hilarious as well.
