November 7, 2010

What's in your SPAM folder??

This is sort of an off-the-wall topic. You see I actually bothered to look in my Gmail Spam folder today for my Second Life email account and for my throwaway real life account. I don't think I've checked either for maybe a month. I was surprised to find that, in both accounts, 90% of the ads were for male enhancement products with the remaining 10% for Canadian pharmacies.

Since Gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, I'm not as reluctant to give out my Gmail addys as I am with my professional personal email. So I'm not surprised that I end up with a fair amount of spam. I've read that spammers try to guess your email address on Gmail using names they find by searching on the net. So if you're "Snickers Snook", they try every variation including snickers_snook, snickerssnook, snickers.snook, snickers-snook, snook-snickers, etc. which in my case, happens to work for my SL account.

It doesn't quite work for my RL Gmail account although my name is part of the address. However, both accounts have clearly female names (well OK Snickers might be a little ambiguous). Yet, both accounts are mostly filled with ads designed for men with serious inferiority complexes, stupid streaks and / or excess money.

On the other hand (or body part), I can't recall ever seeing a spam for breast enlargement. Oh I get a few here and there for diets, wrinkle creams, random household products, African money schemes, lotteries and porn. But the ratio of male-oriented stuff drowns out everything else. Does that mean women are smarter than guys about this stuff so spams targeting females don't work as well? Or are there lots of women who buy online Viagra and penis enlargement pills for their BF's or husbands?? (Here honey, I got these pills for you for my birthday.)

Now spam in my RL professional account is very different from Gmail stuff. There I get mostly pitches for seminars, unreadable foreign language emails, African money schemes and lotteries with few, if any, male-oriented pitches. Weird that they're so different in content. Maybe it's a difference in filtering?

So I'm curious. What's in your spam folder?

4 comments:

  1. pills, pills, pills, and fake watches.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fake watches? Interesting, I can't remember seeing any for those.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My gmail, surprisingly, has very little spam in it. It all goes to the one relating to my organic side; there you also find "pills, pills, pills, and fake watches"... and something called "The Sandbox".

    ReplyDelete
  4. Heh heh Lalo...yup Sandbox. (And I'm not buying anyone anything for my birthday! LMAO)

    ReplyDelete

All thoughts are welcome.