Spam

I, like most people these days, have multiple e-mail addresses. There is my work address, my public address, my private address, and a couple of odd accounts that I use for specific purposes (like my gmail account, which pretty much exists to make my Android equipment easier to use). There's a reason for this, of course. Mail to my private address tends to be from family and friends, while my public account is filled with receipts, ads, job offers, and the occasional Nigerian 411 scam.

The quality of spam filtering varies on these accounts. My work e-mail is protected by a psychotic series of filters that includes the best heuristics and black-listing that money can buy. My Yahoo account has Yahoo working to filter it and my private e-mail has something like SpamAssassin installed at my service provider. What makes this interesting are the occasional inappropriate messages that make it through.

At work, the few that make it through have two general characteristics: they are addressed to one of the large mailing lists and they are genuine, first-class spam. The content is either highly inappropriate or accompanied by an attachment that absolutely screams "I'm a virus!" The stuff that leaks through Yahoo is generally pretty boring. For the most part, they're someone who has figured out a way to camouflage Viagra and Cialis well enough to sneak past the Bayesean filters, or ads for financial companies.

My private e-mail's spam falls into a few key categories that are worth mentioning (in increasing order of offensiveness):

1) Offers for business seminars and management training. These make me think that one of my friends or family has been hacked at some point and his or her contact list has been sold.

2) Gonzo messages. These are the ones with random words or the occasional line from a book or movie. I've dissected these forensically and there is nothing contained within them that would make sending or receiving them useful to anyone.

3) Knock-off/Replica goods. These are offers to sell me knock-offs or replicas of Rolex, Louis Vuitton, and other brand names. They make no effort to pretend to sell the real stuff.

4) Romantic offers. These are the offers to hook me up with the girl or guy of my dreams. The ones that pretend to be from old flames are more offensive, primarily since the implication is that I have somehow forgotten a past dalliance that should now be renewed. Trust me, any romantic adventures that I've forgotten are best left that way.

5) Pharmaceutical offers. These come in spurts. (Boy, that line sounds a lot worse in retrospect.) For some reason, I'll receive a batch of offers for some or all of the drugs that are commonly offered this way, then months will go by before the next batch gets through.

6) Educational offers. The amount of spam dedicated to telling me that a college degree could improve my career opportunities is amazing. I wish that I had known how easy it is to get a degree before I spent all those years in classrooms.

7)  And, without a doubt, the least effective spam in the world (drum roll, please): The bottomless barrage of broadsides bemoaning my basic behavior in bed. The propaganda poking put-downs at the performance of my personal package. Yes, I'm referring to the "Male Enhancement" ads. Why and how these pour through the spam filter is a mystery to me, but boy howdy, do I get them. Herbal supplements that guarantee results that would make a stallion blush, sure-fire techniques for satisfying my mate (the gender non-specificity is a nice touch), and those promising to make me perform like a teenager (which I presume means stammering in front of women and having an acne breakout before each date).

What inspired this posting was an e-mail that slipped through the Yahoo filters this morning from the sender "Sacred Hair Growth". I had to open it to see what it could possibly be. The answer were the two words "Canadian pornstars". This is so transcendently gonzo that it's almost zen-like. It certainly inspired me to wonder if there were scenes of lumberjacks showing up to discover slumber parties going on.

This line of thinking caused me to remember back a few years to 2005. I had the same e-mail address for twelve years. Not only that, but it had been published in several computer books that I had co-authored and had certainly been scattered to the four winds on several newgroups and forums. As a result, I got spam like you wouldn't believe. Since my ISP made no effort to block it, I was getting 150-200 unwanted messages a day. This led me to set up my own filtering system, using SpamAssassin and a few other tools. The thing about rolling your own is that it requires constant maintenance to keep black- and white-lists updated, as well as the tuning of the Bayesean filters.

In practice, scanning through the logs let me discover the concept of the fetish of the month. For whatever reason, pornographic spam has a tendency to focus on different subjects, rotating on a fairly regular basis. I wondered, but never enough to try to find out, whether this was based upon looking for the most common key words in Google searches, or if it was more or less random. Nevertheless, I discovered a great deal about the rather interesting interests of my fellow netizens.

I watched as various ethnic groups and nationalities had their moment in the sun, only to fade when the next group came along. I saw ads aimed at those with an interest in latex, vinyl, leather, and rubber. There were an amazing number of ads for amateur wives, where amateur was misspelled in more ways than you would imagine possible. These inspired the question, "Are there professional wives?", but I digress. Various age groups were promoted, usually falling into the categories of teens, young, older, and mature. This naturally inspired subjects like "Mature Russian Amateur Teen Wives", which topped off the great Russian explosion of 2003.

Throughout all of this, I remained uncurious enough not to pursue any of the topics offered. At least until the great balloon fetish burst into my inbox. One week, almost like magic, much of the spam suddenly focused upon balloons. Not one or two e-mails,  but literally hundreds of messages, all purporting to deliver the finest in balloon erotica.

Now, I have never lived what I would call a sheltered life, but this was new to me. It boggled the mind to imagine what could possibly be a turn-on about balloons. As more and more of these messages poured in, the inevitable happened and I cracked. I Googled "balloon fetish" and opened a few of the sites.

So what is a balloon fetish, you might ask? I'll tell you. These sites consisted of pictures of women and balloons. The women tended to be young, late teens or early twenties. For the most part they were dressed, albeit sometimes in bikinis or nightwear. The balloons were the kind of party balloons that you've blown up before. And the women were playing with the balloons.

No, really. They were throwing the balloons into the air, or holding them in front of themselves. At times, the women would be popping the balloons, usually by sitting or stepping on them. That's it. Almost without exception, these sites wouldn't have warranted a PG-13 rating, let alone an adult-only.

In a strange way, I found this gratifying. Not the balloons, mind you; a typical shampoo commercial is more pornographic. No, the satisfying part was discovering that there are people out there (I presume mostly men) whose idea of a good time is watching someone pop balloons.

Come on, admit it. Doesn't knowing that make you feel a little bit more normal, too?