Best Spam Of The Morning

[filkertom]

Comments

[acelightning]

As a Witch myself, I'm torn between being offended because this perpetuates all the old stereotypes about Witchcraft, being amused at how ridiculous it is... and wanting to know what they're actually peddling.

[filkertom]

Rilly. I can't think of a single pagan or pagan sympathizer I know who wouldn't go through pretty much that exact sequence. (Being a pagan sympathizer, I did, but I wasn't dumb enough to click on even an amusing spam link. [The link I included above was not in the original message, but is to the Wikipedia page for Saint Kitts-Nevis, so that we can all learn a little bit of geography today.])

[acelightning]

I've occasionally seen print ads like this, generally in the back pages of astrology and/or New Age magazines. But that's the first time I've heard of them setting aside their technophobia(*) enough to turn it into spam.

(I know where St. Kitts-Nevis is... but only because I used to work at the UN.)

(*)"Why do Witches ride brooms? Because Witchcraft is a Nature religion, and Nature abhors a vacuum!"

[ardent_firesong]

But....isn't space part of nature? o,o

(/playing along)

[bryanp]

I can so see this as a Billy Mays infomercial pitchline.

[filkertom]

Oh jeez, that'd be hilarious. Where did they find that guy!?

[jeriendhal]

BILLY MAYS here for OLD WITCHCRAFT SECRETS! For only THREE EASY PAYMENTS of $14.95, we'll show how to CAST SPELLS, CURSE YOUR ENEMIES and RAISE THE DEAD, all from the COMFORT of your VERY OWN HOME!

CALL NOW and you'll even get YOUR VERY OWN DEMONIC FAMILIAR, at a value of YOUR ETERNAL SOUL, but now available through this EXCLUSIVE OFFER, ABSOLUTELY FREE!

[tarsa]

::sprays monitor with coffee::

Dude (yes, I still say "Dude" upon occasion)! Can I borrow that, with credit given? Also~~I completely (see, I didn't say "totally") in love with your icon! Can I ste~~,er, copy it? Credit given, of course!

*grin*

[redaxe]

Not spam, but this bit of needs-proofreading I just saw amuses the hell out of me.

[amazingadrian]

Wow. That's pretty...yeah.

[amazingadrian]

What I find pretty amusing is that they talk themselves into a corner on the very same advertisement.

As you know, many witches and wizards are FURIOUS about this.

"So any day now, you guys are gonna get hexed to oblivion, huh?"

They has a Hammer . . .

[robin_june]

. . . and paganism is just another nail.

I've never received religious spam before, but by scanning the structure of the sales pitch above, I see the same techniques, arguments, and pressures that have slid through my inboxes for decades. Exactly! Sheesh!

Spam: its return on distribution investment is R-selected, scattershot, and probably at a payoff rate of 0.0001%. If it wasn't so cheap to disseminate . . .

Re: They has a Hammer . . .

[the_s_guy]

It's things like this that make me start thinking that charging for email wouldn't be so bad, if it was above, say, 100 messages a day outgoing or so.

But then I think that it would swiftly degenerate into the same issues that phone contracts have with messages and whatnot - everyone would offer something slightly different, and the number of freebies would eventually be worn away to zero.

Which isn't to say that if I ran an ISP I wouldn't have a free-email cap to slow the spammers down. Plus run tarpits and offer free optional greylisting etc...

Re: They has a Hammer . . .

[kengr]

I think the only "fair" thing that'd work would be if the recipient could send a copy of a message to their mail provider with a "this is spam". If the provider agrees (there'd be provisions for appealing, and read further to see why it would be in the providers interest to agree), they'd credit to user with (say) $5