i do not want them, spam i am

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, March 5, 2002 6:53pm

In spite of my vigorous excoriations of past spammers on this public web site, I continue to receive unsolicited bulk e-mail.

You might call it "spam".

The temerity of these would-be hoodwinkers galls me. So I have no choice but to publicly humiliate them again until they stop, and to use as many five dollar words as I know while doing it.

The first e-mail I got was actually rather clever. It read, in full:

Mike,

Thanks again for lunch it was great!

Best regards,
Steve.

Longtime Cock-a-hoop readers will recognize that my name is not Mike.

And had I been a little more sleep-deprived on that fateful Wednesday when I received this e-missive, I might have replied to Mr. Steve that not only is my name not Mike, but I did not have lunch with him.

But I wasn't dropped on my head just yesterday. I know a bamboozlement attempt when I see one. Steve (if that is his real name) may simply be looking for responses that indicate functioning e-mail addresses.

I won't give him the satisfaction. Instead, I will post my response here in this pulic forum:

Steve,

No problem, but the next lunch is on you.

If you do not want to have lunch with me and do not with to be contacted in the future about this meal, click here ha ha ha.

Sincerely,
Mike

That'll learn 'im.

The other spam I got was less sneaky. Its subject line said "Bulk Email Works!", while the full text of its body said, simply:

[Error: Formatting error: Non-hexadecimal character in QP encoding]

Which, you know, brings the veracity of the subject line into question.