On Spam

Hi there, Karyn Sheets and Lillian Bowers, but, I am afraid, I neither want a $269,000 loan nor any shares in Premier Holdings Group. And, ahem, Adara Dalton, I don't need any Viagra. Thanks anyway. The volume of spam has doubled and the ingenuity of spammers has, at least, quadrupled. They have breached every firewall, junk filter and even the US Can-Spam Act of 2003. Around 90 per cent of all email may now be spam. And, amazingly, it works. Those penny stocks they thrust at you do actually rise in the days after a mass mailing. That means, presumably, that people also try to buy Viagra or take up those loans. I don't do any of that, but I am drawn to spam because of its strange poetry. The names are a delight: Ezra Mcbride, Trinidad Forbes, Fluker D.Hysell, Dice H.Musser, Mahalath Weathersby and the enigmatic Lyubov Pettengill. Then there are those curious prose-poems attached to the messages: 'The turning past, indifference, and she would have imagined that bingley had received his sanction to be happy, had she...' wrote Karyn Sheets to me this morning at the foot of her loan offer. Surely, the great spam epic is waiting to be written, or possibly an anthology.