30November 2006

Why are spammers such illiterate morons?

Years ago I remember advising my clients to be very careful when writing B2B email subject lines, especially for newsletters. The problem, I explained, is that people are so inundated with spam that they often hit the delete key by accident. So whenever you send out your business emails you have to make every attempt to keep them from looking spammy in any way.

I also worried that spammers would get really good at writing subject lines that are nearly indistinguishable from actual subject lines.

But it's a neverending source of wonder to me that this has not been the case... still. Spam is ridiculously easy to spot, especially with the latest fad of nonsensical word pairings. I have always been able to go down the list of emails, glancing only at the subject line for maybe a nanosecond. The ones written by spammers are just soooo obvious... and so moronic. If they were smart they'd study "real" emails at length to learn how to mimic us, but apparently they're all as dumb as dirt.

I'm thinking of compiling a whole section on my blog, like Jay Leno does from people's newspaper typo submissions, called "Spammer's Headlines."

Today's winner: Is your meat still short?

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