I was looking at my folder where my Google mail automatically sends
the spam. One common trick called my attention. This was just looking
at the sender and the one line with the beginning of the message that
the list of spam messages shows. I don't usually open spam messages =)
The sender is the name of someone, someone who can be anybody. The
beginning of the message starts saying "Following what we were
talking...", "In reply to your question...", "Hi buddy!". Obviously
they want to look familiar to you.
But then I was asking myself. Why do the spam senders think that this
strategy would work? How on earth do they think that I am going to
open a message from someone that I don't know or don't have a clue of
who they are. My pessimistic and prejudiced point of view gave me a
picture of the answer.
We are encouraged to do "networking", ultimately to get email
addresses from strangers from whatever party, dinner or meeting we go
to. The race is to have as many "friends" as possible. Your number of
acquaintances is a measure of your popularity and your social success.
Well, at least in appearance. Now let's add to this the growing
availability of services and products to buy in Internet. I see then
the gold mine of spammers. The more tangential your relationships are
with people and the more consumerism is in your life the less you know
who is writing you and who send you something worth to read. Of
course, I have to admit that some spam messages are clever than
others. For example those who wants to attract my attention with real
concerns such as... mmm... such as how to enlarge... my financial
capital.
Fortunately and at the end of the day that is only my blurred vision
of the world. The spam detector makes most of job identifying the
undesirable mail and leaves me with the only task of having some
amusement reading lists of messages. That just before clicking the
"delete all" button.
