Got a spam today with the intriguing title “Look, I’m totally into you, I totally want you, but we have dinner plans.”

Got a spam today for police-seized cars, and gotta admire the symmetry: using ‘legally’ stolen bandwidth to sell ‘legally’ stolen goods.

(They tell you that the cars belonged to “drug kingpins”, which even if it were true would not justify plunder; but four out of five drivers thus robbed at gunpoint are never charged with any offense.)

Today’s prize for chutzpah in spam goes to Technomages [what would JMS say?], whose ad ends with “Click Here to not receive future mailings of this offer”. If you click, you won’t see this ‘offer’ again, but you’ll get a hundred others. If not, presumably you’re eager to get the same pitch over and over again.

Got a spam today that may have been designed purely to annoy me. The title is “hi, I fixed the problem . . .” and the entire content is

<img src=”http://www.1stchannel.com/images/pixel.gif?track=1&entry=[myaddress]” border=”0″>

Had I opened this with image-loading enabled, it would look blank to me, but notify 1stchannel that my address is valid. (2004 Oct 07: This is why Mozilla lets you turn off image-loading in mail.)

Meanwhile, stop me if you’ve heard this one: ( . . more . . )

(I received about three versions of this warning today. This one came first, from Harvey Newstrom of Extropy Institute, and is the most detailed.)

Yahoo has added a new section to your “Account Info” that requests spammers to send you unsolicited e-mail. They have set this on for everybody. Everybody’s default settings are initially set to “yes” meaning that everybody who uses Yahoo is allegedly requesting advertisers to send unsolicited e-mail to them!

Follow these instructions to turn these settings off:

• Go to groups.yahoo.com
• Click on “Account Info” in the upper-right corner
• Click on “Edit your marketing preferences” down under “Member Information” under “Yahoo! Mail Address”
• Click all the buttons to “No” for Special Offers and Marketing Communications
• Scroll down to make sure you get all the checkboxes
• Look at the very bottom of the page fto click “No” for U.S. Mail and Phone calls.
• Press the “Save Changes” button
• Click “continue” to confirm your changes
• Click the “Finished” button

I just got a spam with this tag:

. . . This message is sent in compliance of the new email Bill HR 1910. Under Bill HR 1910 passed by the 106th US Congress on May 24, 1999, this message cannot be considered SPAM as long as I include a valid return address and the way to be removed. . . .

Traditionally the ‘law’ cited is Section 301 of HR 1618, if memory serves, and I hadn’t seen it given a date before.

Today some clown invited me to “Save over 300% on MEDICATION!”
Sadly, the spam contained no valid address from which I might learn more about this offer to pay me $2 when I order $1 worth of Viagra.