Image via Complex Original
We don’t think spam emails get enough love. Ninety percent of the emails you get on a daily basis are worthless. You have to weed through that Olive Garden newsletter, that Container Store sale notice, and that check-in from your probation officer before you even get to anything worth reading. Unlike these humdrum emails, at least spam is interesting. Spam emails are like a wonderful fairytale, but for adults. You can read about Nigerian princes, magical weight-loss berries, and, umm, male enhancement with the click of a button. Sure, it isn’t real, but you could say that about pretty much everything on the Internet. Is spam any less real than that GAP rebate that’s impossible to claim or that email from a co-worker that suggests “solutions for better integrating departmental workflow”? And unlike these dumb emails, spam always makes for an interesting read. We want to pay our respects to the wonderful world of spam by honoring the 10 Types of Spam Emails You Get All The Time.
Social Media Expert Spam
Appeals To: The Tech-Unsavvy
Social media experts are this generation's snake oil salesmen. At least snake oil salesmen gave you a cool, vintage bottle with weird looking liquid in it before skipping down with your cash. At least "real" social media experts will show up at your office and babble for a couple hours before they take your money and pump it into strategies for increasing your Klout score. Social media scammers will take your money and won't even pretend to look like they're doing work while they cash your checks. Maybe we're being too harsh. Can you really put a price on "[giving] your Facebook page a wow factor?"
Lucky Winner Spam
Appeals To: Those People Who Always Complain About Never Winning Anything
Life will be much easier if you come to terms with the fact that you are never going to be lucky. You can stop wasting your money buying lottery tickets and wasting your time hitting on models at bars. The lottery is a tax on poor people and models are only going to date you if you've already won the lottery. It simply isn't going to happen for you, buddy. It's for the best if you just keep your head down and slog through life knowing full well that the only gains you're going to receive in this world are through blood, sweat, and tears. Of course, this doesn't apply to betting on horse racing or cock fighting, because you do that to look cool more than you do for the actual cash. It would be pretty awesome if you ended up one of those guys in a wrinkled suit coat and soiled tie staring at the ponies, hoping that old Quicksilver will win you the big race and help you avoid a lead pipe to the kneecaps. You could become the subject of an award winning photo series or documentary short subject.
Dream Job Spam
Appeals To: The Lazy
If your dream job is sitting on your ass at home while collecting paychecks for doing nothing, our educational system has failed you. [Ed. note: Brenden is a freelancer who works from his bedroom at home.] There are very few jobs in this world where you can receive money and not do any work. For some inexplicable reason, extremely attractive women already hold all of these jobs. Those of us out there who are a) not remarkably attractive and b) are male, had better give up all hope of being hired as a "personal assistant" or an "import car model" and look forward to a life of hard labor. Yup, it looks like you're going to actually have to work for a living.
For some, the best option is to find something you love, so that your job doesn't feel like work. We are pretty sure that route is for suckers. We recommend getting some sort of job in middle management where you can blame all of your failures on those above or below you. You can sit back in your office chair, stare blankly into your computer screen, and collect a steady paycheck as you wait for the icy hand of death to deliver you from the mind-numbing, soul-crushing monotony of existence. On second thought, we're just going to click the link and see about this whole 900K in 90 days thing.
Free iPad Spam
Appeals To: People Who Lack A Basic Understanding of Commerce
Of all of the free iPad emails we've seen in our day, this is our absolute favorite. Here are some of the things we love about it:
1. It is a personal email from Mark Zuckerberg
2. He begins the email with "Hi Friend"
3. Apparently Mark Zuckerberg has a Hotmail address
4. The phrase "Once yet again"
5. Even though Mr. Zuckerberg sent you this email, he needs you to "make sure you enter your email" on the short survey.
Yes, we are still waiting for our complimentary iPad 3. If you have any ideas who we should contact about this, just shoot a tweet to our editor Jason Parham, @nonlinearnotes.
Male Enhancement Spam
Appeals To: Men
Let's be honest gentlemen: every man wishes they were better endowed. Okay, there might be a few guys out there with a package so large it hinders their day-to-day activities, but there are worse problems to have. The rest of us have hoped in vein [sic] for a visit from the penis fairy since we first pulled out a tape measurer to take stock of our newly changed teenage members. We got news for you, fellahs, the penis fairy isn't real, unless that's what your creepy Uncle Max called himself when he came by the house when your parents were out of town. Nothing is going to make your penis bigger, though you can make it look bigger by tattooing it to look like a dragon.
Weight Loss Spam
Appeals To: The Self-Conscious
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Women stress about weight loss and men want to increase the size of their penis. This is the spammer's motto. Whether they are peddling miracle pills or acai berries, junk mailers want to capitalize on your desire to get thin quick. We Americans are a strange breed. Our desperation to shed some weight motivates us to purchase infomercial fitness equipment and prompts us to take up one fad diet or another, but we aren't quite desperate enough to exercise. The rest of the world may think we're lazy, but we think this is simply a matter of priorities. There are so many state fair funnel cakes and Renaissance Faire turkey legs to eat, we simply don't have time to commit to trudging to the gym every day. The Industrial Revolution happened so that we didn't have to engage in physical activity, don't those thin Europeans understand that? While they're out there skiing or jogging or whatever they do to stay slim, we'll be right here waiting for them to actually develop a magic berry to keep us thin.
Debt Reduction Spam
Appeals To: Those in Debt (aka Every American Citizen)
Why would you ever want to get out of debt? There is something so deeply American about having more bills to pay than you have cash in your bank account, and if you don't like it, you can move some place like Africa where they have less stuff. Stuff is extremely important. How are you going to let your neighbors know that you're better than them if you don't have a hot tub or a jetski to symbolize your financial dominance over the rest of the block? You see, the only thing that can really make you happy in life is money. If you don't have money, you need to pretend like you have money. The "problem" of course is that eventually, they stop letting you borrow money. If you do things right, by, perhaps paying one credit card off with another or dipping into your kid's college fund because he's going to get a football scholarship anyway, you'll never run out of ways to get money. By the time the man catches up with you, you'll be dead anyway. If you're not, you can just kill yourself. Drowning yourself in that hot tub will leave a pretty clean corpse. Trust us, don't worry about reducing your debt. Living forty years with dope stuff is way better than living eighty years as a poor sap.
So yeah, thanks but no thanks Finance Managers Co., we don't need your help "Elimiynate"-ing our "diebt." We like our "diebt" just fine.
Nigerian Prince Spam
Appeals To: Friends and Allies of Nigerian Royalty
We have seen variations on this theme involving Chinese, Peruvian, and Zimbabwean princes, but for some reason Nigerian royalty gets the most play. We aren't exactly sure why this is, but we would have loved to have been in the room when they figured it out.
"Bill, what country's royal family would gullible people give money to sight unseen?"
"Thanks for asking Steve. We've crunched the numbers and it looks like if we consider factors of socio-economic empathy and name recognition we come up with ... Nigeria."
"Great, Bill. Write it up and send it out."
Porn Spam
Appeals To: Everyone
Depending on who you ask, somewhere between five and thirty percent of the Internet is porn. We have nothing to add to that debate, but we feel that we can safely say that most people like porn. We'll also go out on a limb and say that there are many people out there who wouldn't mind getting some high quality free porn in their inbox on the daily, so long as it had a subject line that looked innocuous to nosey co-workers. The problem with the spammer's approach is false advertising. We know very few people out there who would turn down a "FREE PORN SEX VIDEO." Porn and sex combined? What will they think of next? The problem is, much like freedom, this porn is rarely actually free. After a few grainy seconds of video, you are invariably asked to enter your parents' credit card information. If the best porn in life were free, oh what a world this would be.
Random Nonsense Spam
Appeals To: Dadaists
Our favorite spam emails are the ones that don't even try. Apparently, spammers think it is worthwhile to string random phrases together and hope someone clicks somewhere in the body of the email. Maybe emails like this are actually experimental art projects. Maybe we'll find out someday that such emails are part of some grand graduate thesis exploring how we view and react to random words on the digital page. Maybe a team of psychologists is painstakingly collecting data in hopes of unpacking the Internet user's response to every possible combination of words in the English language.
We really can't be sure of the purpose behind these emails, so just to be safe, click on any link you see in such emails and enter your credit card information where appropriate.
