Here’s a tip: If you plan to complain about too much junk e-mail, don’t give out your e-mail address twice a week on New York City television.
Since I do give out my address on the air, I receive hundreds of extra messages a day — only a small percentage of which are notes or questions from viewers of WABC-TV. The rest is spam — or inappropriate in all kinds of ways that I won’t get into here. (I also get spam from my Poynter address, but that’s another story.) Next week, I will share some anti-spam tips and invite you to share yours at, well, poynter@sree.net.
This week, I wanted to share examples of some of the spam messages that I actually opened, i.e., subject lines that fooled me. This isn’t “spam I got,” but “spam that got me.” I thought twice about sharing these and exposing myself to ridicule — and perhaps more spam. But I think some of you might find what I am about to confess useful in your own spam battles.
Start by taking a look at this screen shot of an e-mail folder on my computer:
Click here to pop up the larger image.
When I showed this to a friend, he had two reactions:
1. “Oh my God! You still use Pine!” He was so used to Outlook, Eudora, and web-based programs that seeing this old-fashioned mail reader was a shock. Why I still use Pine despite its drawbacks is fodder for another column.
2. “Boy, you fell for some dumb messages.”
Let’s examine some of those dumb messages and their subject lines to see why I clicked on them.
My e-mail reading habit is to scan either the senders’ names or the subject lines as fast as possible, deleting messages that might be spam without reading them. I have gotten really good at “sensing” spam, but if I have even the slightest doubt it might not be spam, I don’t delete. These messages I open. If they, do, indeed, turn out to be spam, I dump them in a folder to write just such a column.
But I am easy to fool partly because I don’t, obviously, know the names of all the viewers and readers, so I can’t afford to just delete names I don’t know.
I almost automatically delete any message without a first name and a last name in the “from” section, though that sometimes gets me in trouble with folks with AOL handles. (Message to AOLers: cute handles can make you look like a spammer; chose an obvious variation of your full name instead.) I also automatically delete subject lines which start with my name: “Sree, compare rates.” Or, “Sree, cool screensaver.”
Here are some that got through my visual scanning filter:
I was fooled by: The “real” sounding name, as well as the the subject line, which, I thought, might be about a page on my site or one of my stories.
Clue I missed: The fact that the subject line was in lowercase, since I am one of the few people who writes routine messages in lowercase, infuriating some friends. Normal people are usually too professional to write in lowercase.
I was fooled by: The “Re:” and the words “morning” and “meeting” — I am in way too many of them.
Clue I missed: The lack of a last name.
I was fooled by: The “FWD:” — lots of friends forward me messages and the “broken link” — I thought someone was trying to help me.
Clue I missed: None, I think.
I was fooled by: The reference to my “account,” since I have gotten similar messages from, say, my web hosting company.
Clue I missed: The opposite of the lowercase problem — every word was capped.
I was fooled by: The congratulations — my wife and I had twins a couple of months earlier and I was receiving subjects with similar subject lines.
Clue I missed: So many here, including “Lotto Informations” — puh-lease!
I was fooled by: The reference to “no spam.” Big mistake.
Clue I missed: Every single one of the hundreds of messages I have received about no spam lists and similar ideas have ALWAYS been spam messages themselves.
Next week, I will provide some tips on how to handle spam.
Your turn: Have an anti-spam tip or site you want to recommend? Let me know at poynter@sree.net. Sree’s Links:
