As one of the administrators for the ACM mailing list, I am used to dealing with a lot of spam at this point. Even with spam filtering, it used to be pretty terrible, until we made it more aggressive. Of course, none was going out to the list; it was really a difference between spam to review and spam that is auto-deleted. Mailman sucks, so my inbox gets filled with a lot of the bounces, which gmail spam filtering can handle nicely, but a select few can still get through. Spam is one of the most pointless things I can imagine, but at the very least, it usually includes a link, or some sort of ad. I got the same spam message a couple of times that didn’t quit follow that convention:

Subject: best
your life is crap

There were at two different from addresses and names, so it was pretty clear it was spam. The only purpose I could see to something like this spam is to reply back, desperate for answers. Maybe they were writing some huge long spam and hit send by accident a little too early, or there spam creation software sucks. What a strange piece of spam….

I was randomly browsing last night, when I came across some eBay sniping service. I was recently sniped in the last 5 seconds on a VAX I was bidding on, so I viewed the site with a mild degree of interest. I started to read through the user testimonial page when I noticed a little gem on the page. Each one seemed to be fine on its own; I never really trust these pages, but I could believe that these were real, until I noticed these two:

Not your Daddy’s Sniping Service!!!

March 27, 2007, by lambykins

Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Wm. Howard, citro_cell

This is the best one

March 24, 2007, by lobster_soss

Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Thanks, Jeff

It seems that the only things they bothered to change in these two were the title, month, “username,” and end line. The worst part is that they put these two right next to each other. I guess it just goes to show how much you can trust advertising.