Year: 2005

Where I look on the web, everyone is complaining about SPAM. “My Inbox is full of SPAM”, “I am lacking behind because of SPAM”, “My site was SPAMed” and stuff like that. I beileve that everything in the world has its good and bad sides. Such situation with SPAM when everyone is complaining about it is one-sided though. I believe there is some good to be found. Here is my small contribution.

Every time comments in my blog get SPAMed I feel good. You might think that I am such a pathetic loser that SPAM comments are the only kind that I get, but that’s not true. I am soon to celebrate a 1000th comment (that’s a hint by the way). The reason for my joy is my choice of software. Since I migrated to WordPress SPAM stopped bothering me. At all. When yet another script comes in and leaves two or three dozen comments about “online casino” or “morgage bonus” all over my posts, all I have to do is click on “Awaiting moderation” link in the administration interface, scroll down to the “Mark all as SPAM” link, click it, and than click “Moderate comments” button to submit my moderation. That’s it. It probably takes me less time to discard all of these comments than it takes that script to generate and post them. Fantastic!

But my blog SPAM is not the only kind that provides me with good mood. Occasionally, a SPAM message would get through my anti-SPAM software that protects my mailbox. Since these are usually singular messages which are easy to identify and delete, I can afford some time to look inside. More often than not they are pretty funny. Consider this one from today.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 09:01:08 -0700
Subject: Your password has been successfully updated

[-- Attachment #1 --]
[-- Type: text/html, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.5K --]

   Dear user leonid,

   You have successfully updated the password of 
   your Mamchenkov account.

   If you did not authorize this change or if you 
   need assistance with your account, please 
   contact Mamchenkov customer service at:
   [email protected]

   Thank you for using Mamchenkov!
   The Mamchenkov Support Team

   +++ Attachment: No Virus (Clean)
   +++ Mamchenkov Antivirus - www.mamchenkov.net

[-- Attachment #2: approved-password.zip --]

Isn’t it funny? First of all, I am the administrator of mamchenkov.net domain and all services related to it. So I know that this is crap even before I finish reading the Subject line. Oh, wait. I actually know that this is crap even before I finish reading the From email address, because, guess what, there is no such email as [email protected]. And, of course, there is no such thing as “The Mamchenkov Support Team”. Or “Mamchenkov Antivirus”. That all is just pure fun! It’s like I would be trying to convince you that you are not you, but that I am you, although I am obviously not. :)

Now that I am thinking about it, I was wrong saying that the Web remembers only the bad stuff about SPAM. There was a lot of laughter on that Slashdot story about some African cosmonaut left on the orbit. And there was this poetry project that was using phrases from the SPAM messages composed into poems.

What’s your SPAM fun story?