Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Not only does it clutter up your in box, but even when you say yes, you'd like to make $20,000 in your spare time, nobody answers.
Apr 18, 2000 | They arrive on your doorstep, unbidden and satisfaction-guaranteed, hawking gadgets and tonics and pills and get-rich-quick schemes. In prose worthy of P.T. Barnum, they try to convince you that you'll make $45,000 in one month, have a sex life comparable with Hugh Hefner's and get a peek at the naked breasts of Pamela Anderson Lee.
Spammers are the snake oil salesman of our generation, traveling hucksters who wend their way across the Net peddling their wares: offbeat inventions and the modern day equivalent of homespun remedies in thick glass bottles. They are out there, invisible, hunched over computers in small towns and big cities, squirreling away addresses like precious gems and firing away enthusiastic missives in the hopes that someone, anyone, will respond.
But the great mystery of spammers is why they load up your in box with their entrepreneurial dreams, but then don't make it easy to buy their advertised wares. Try to respond to the spam and you'll see: There's no one there, no one to sell the products so hyperbolically promoted. The Web sites they so urgently insist that you visit are usually yanked down by the spammers' Internet service providers before you can even click on that highlighted URL; the voice mail at the end of those 800-numbers never seems to elicit a response. Why do spammers bother to send out messages, en masse, if they aren't going to be there to greet their customers? Spam is an even greater waste of bandwidth than you imagine.
Over three weeks I saved my spam; I received exactly 310 spam messages, or about 14 messages a day. Of those, many were repeat messages -- several meandered their way into my in box up to 10 times over the course of three days. You've seen the e-mails, too, I'm sure: "LOSE WEIGHT WHILE YOU SLEEP!!" "Search Engine Secrets Discovered!" and "The Internet Spy Guide." There's "homeworker needed," "$10,000 in 30-45 days," and so on. As the Net has exploded, spam has become as familiar and American as apple pie.
And as the Net expands into new media outlets -- broadband, wireless, portable devices -- you can expect to see even more spam. Just as junk faxes begat e-mail spam, e-mail spam will surely beget wireless spam, cell phone spam, perhaps even interactive TV spam. Already, cell phone owners are starting to receive spam in the form of text messages. Those who subscribe to wireless PDA services, such as Palm.Net, which charge for each downloaded kilobyte, will undoubtedly be incensed when they have to pay to read the 29 kb, 4,900-word multilevel marketing spam "Dream of a LIFETIME!!"
By saving megabytes of mail jammed with precocious samples of entrepreneurial wit, I was hoping to get a sense of what all that spam says. Have I been missing anything by deleting it, unread? And who is sending it to me -- anyone I should know? I spent whole days trying to locate the people behind the spams in my in box. I imagined a grandma in Poughkeepsie selling bulk e-mail software or a slimy salesman hawking illicit Viagra, but finding these supposed salespeople is harder than you'd think.
Think of spam, and your mind probably goes straight to those most obvious, and least prosaic, porn solicitations -- those tantalizing tidbits from "Candy" and "Debbi," so rudely personal that it's almost a shock to open them. "Here is that site you asked for, it's the hottest FREE hardcore you will ever see!!" they say, and it takes me a second every time to register that I didn't, in fact, ask for any free hardcore at all.
But porn is just the tip of the iceberg. If I were to believe this spam I've collected, I can get every pill and drug I've ever wanted, and some I've only imagined. I can visit a Viagra site that will sell me this prescription-only impotence drug with no questions asked, if I'll just read and agree to an extensive "legal" permissions form that waives the spammer's liability for a host of embarrassing side effects. (Four days after I first visited the site, I returned to copy the text, but, like so many other sites advertised in spam, it had been effaced.)
Alternatively, there's something called "America's #1 Natural Super Sex Pill Herbal V," which proffers a roster of sex-crazed clients as proof of its magical ingredients: "athletes, movie stars, retired businessmen, playboys, even a former Olympic basketball coach!" To get the sex life of a retired businessman, apparently, all I have to do is send $29.95. Even better is a spray called Snoreless (the spam generously explains that snoring is "a hoarse, harsh noise made by breathing through the mouth while sleeping"), which I can force my bed partner to ingest. Merely $34.99 for a 60-day supply.
"Cyber Hound 2000" is a racy little software package that will help me find hidden assets and debtors, and investigate my friends and neighbors. ("Everybodies [sic] getting it!" blurts the title, so surely my friends and neighbors are already investigating me.) And there's the "Celebrities Exposed 2000" CD-ROM, which offers nude pictures of Leeza Gibbons and Meryl Streep, among others; "Internet Spy and You," which, I'm guessing, needs no introduction; and the InfoPro CD-ROM, which promises Microsoft's foolproof sales recipe for Internet success, whatever that may be.
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