Spam mail

I was going through my email today, then on an impulse, decided to have a look at the spam mail folder for the heck of it. The titles of the spam mail are largely uninteresting, "Re: this" or "Re:that", occasionally having rather clever titles like "urgent:" or "your email got bounced, etc." None were particularly attractive though; spammers arent very inventive I guess.

I remember in the past, there used to be some internet virus-ly thingy that propagates through spam mail. The attachment is named something like "I love you", or "secret admirer". Now that's what I call a good spam (though not good in the sense of being morally good; you get the idea). However staunch a spam fighter you are, you will feel an urge to open the email, open the attachment. Even if you deleted it eventually, there is still the lingering tinge, a slight tug at the heart: what if?

What if what? What if someone is really secretly admiring you and sent you an email of course! No matter how lowly your opinion of yourself you claim to have, deep down inside, you secretly think that you are the most adorable, most lovable person in the world, and it is weird that people havent been rushing to kiss your hands and gushing out their love for you. (They are shy, thats why.) Thats also why it isnt that unthinkable that some secret admirer could send you an email professing his/her love for you. In fact, its a miracle that your inbox hasnt been flooded by such mails in the first place!

Of course, if you are living in some places like Singapore, where everyone's name is along the lines of "Dao Nee" and "Dao Hui", and you get such an email from "Staccie Roberto" etc., you know immediately that its a hoax. Not to mention that you know your english is so poor that no foreigners with Caucasian-sounding names would ever take interest in you.

Yet two increasingly popular trends conspire to push the suspicion down to a minimum. More and more young people in Singapore are adopting English names like Kate, Leo, Kleith, etc., making emails from similar sounding names seem more possible and realistic. Whats more, spammers have begun to catch on that emails from people with First and Middle name in their Sender information rarely hit the jackpot: whats the chance that you really know someone who is named "Jack", and has also a middle name "Zetarine"?

Eventually you might get an email from a "Rachel", with a title of "Love letter", and it just happens that the cute girl in class/office, is also named Rachel, and has been casting flirty looks at you all week. It would be cruel indeed to delete the email without even opening it first! And if there is an attachment that says "my feelings for you", probably most hot-blooded males will hastily open the attachment without even noticing that it is a .exe file, or if they did, to the hell with it, we can always format the pc later!

It all depends on the name of the sender I am thinking. Some perfectly normal mails from perfectly normal friends can pass as spam if you are in that particular mood. Dont even bother to open their mail: its probably crap, and their attachments probably crap too.

Some mails however, are totally suspicious looking, with an attachment that says "thisisvirus.exe" and "I hate you" in the email main body, which most people would assure you that it would be perfectly potty to open such a mail, yet without hesistation you would open the attachment if it is from the right person. Or follow the link to some sites that are totally insecure and suspicious looking and probably have 50 keyloggers installed in your pc the minute you login.

Not that these considerations will stop you from opening such mails. Some mails just have to be opened, regardless of the consequences. The day when spammers can achieve a similar level of compulsion for the emails is the day when spam mail is going to destroy the whole world.