Why, we ask ourselves, does spam work? Scott Adams has the answer:
All [ Barney ] knows is that he’s poor, bald, and hung like a frozen caterpillar. For the low price of $29.95 he can fix all of that without leaving home. He figures it might be a scam, but can he really take the chance that it’s not? So Barney places his order for the miracle pill and wonders why the Nigerian vendor needs his social security number.
The interesting part of this post – well, the other interesting part of this post – is that Scott is trying to understand the “low quality” of the spam he’s getting … mispelled words, sentences that make no grammatical sense, and so on.
The reality is that spammers are being forced into awkward grammatical constructions and amateurish spelling errors as tactics in their ongoing arms race with spam-detection software. Which begs the question: if 100% of your spam makes it through to the inbox, but it’s also so mind-bogglingly stupid that no-one actually opens it, did you win?
I think not.
[tags] dilbert, scott adams, spam, spam filter, email, john koetsier [/tags]