I was just perusing the spam folder on one of my GMail accounts. I do that from time to time, just to double check that nothing "real" has inadvertently been filtered. I don't auto-delete spam because I'm just a bit mistrusting of filters, having been in the position of actually writing them at one point in my career. I find spam to be a bit amusing as well, when they're well crafted.
I usually don't really care for the spastic random nonsense that ends up in the Subject: field of an e-mail, especially after receiving the 100th e-mail in a row stating that "A message has been received from Alexandra K." I don't know who the hell Alexandra K. is, but she must be terribly lonely, unemployed and bored to send me all the e-mail that she does.
But occasionally I do get a little bit of gold, or at least a hint of gold gilding on an otherwise unpolished turd. For instance, tonight, as I perused the contents of my spam folder, I noticed an e-mail that apparently was from my own address. The subject delightfully mentioned Dr. Who specials. Now, I just watched the final of the David Tennant Doctor specials, but I thought that was fairly different. Sadly, it was just another HTML advertisement for some online pharmacy selling V1AGRA and C1AL1S and other penis enhancement pills.
But another caught my eye. This one from one Jane Johnson, offered me a link to "One of the best teen porn sites on the internet with free movies and downloads". Now, I'm not one to shrug away from a good bit of internet debauchery, though I'd never visit a porn site that advertised via unsolicited e-mail. It's just bad form, and NOT really a good selling technique to use with a natural born skeptic like myself. But the name really did catch me.
Jane Johnson, the one I knew, at least, is the mother of the girl I once proposed to. She would have been my mother-in-law, though admittedly it would have been briefly, now that I look at things with the perspective of age, but still. This one threw me a little. In one day, I received an e-mail for cheap, illegally procured drugs that was tangentially linked to one of my favorite Sci-Fi shows on the BBC and another for porn, with the Sender: field stating the name of my one time ersatz Mother-In-Law.
Now normally, I would be just a bit more paranoid about the coincidence, but I have to just chalk this up to randomness. These things are generated using a whole dictionary of phrases, names and so forth to trick the unsuspecting. Given enough time, and enough e-mail, and I can fairly guess that I have received several million of these by now, having been a presence on the 'Net since, well, since it began in the form we know today, the odds are that something like this will happen.
It's akin to something we used to say at the Omelet Shoppe, a little diner back home that my friends and I called our second home. A place like the mythical Cheers, where everybody knew my name, and the waitresses would have a table ready for me, complete with a cup of Hot Tea and extra sugar, before I'd even made into the front door. We'd always say that if you sat in the Omelet Shoppe long enough, eventually everyone you ever knew would stop in for some breakfast, or coffee.
The internet and spam is like that. Eventually you WILL see a random mating of first and last names that matches someone you know, or knew. It's just odds playing out.
Now that I think about it, maybe it's time to buy that lotto ticket, while the odds are still in my favor.
Das Aggregator!