Cas is currently…
WARNING: What follows is a passive-aggressive grump. I have no excuse, other than I am, well, in a grumpy mood today.
We all have one in our address books – that one person who doggedly believes every piece of spam they get in their inbox. That one person who continually passes on the “WARNING! Email this to ten people or you will die a horrible and painful death!” emails. I have one such person. She used to be one of my closest friends in college, but I don’t talk to her much any more. This is for a variety of reasons, but no small part is that she doesn’t have a current email address for me.
What?! I hear you cry? This girl is your friend, but you haven’t given her your new email address? (To be honest, not so new any more). Why does she still languish under the impression that your hotmail addy is the address you check constantly?
She is incapable of sending email that ISN’T spam, that’s why. She is the forwarding queen. She is the one person who spammers and phishers go to bed at night praying for.
I had thought that as she approached her mid-twenties, she would start to develop some common sense, or at least a mild level of skepticism. Alas, that is not to be.
The pick of this weeks spam email from her is something pretending to be from hotmail, the text of which goes as follows (all spelling EXACTLY as appeared in the message. Can you spot their six mistakes?):
Dear Hotmail User,
We understand that you have previously recieved many messages that have stated the closing of accounts not being used within our servers. This message, however, is your final warning. Within this message is encoded a small program that will located and debug your account when sent to fifteen other Hotmail users. If you do not send this message to fifteen Hotmail users within 24 hours of recieving the message, your account will be PERMANETLY SHUT-DOWN. When and if you send this, we hereby grant that you will no longer recieve such messages as this one.
We realize that this process is becoming an annoyance, however, and this is the final message you will recieve from the Hotmail Announcement staff. Thank you for your time and cooperation.
Sincerely,
Calvin W. Kreantz
MSN Accounts Coordinator
Now, not only does the text of this scream “SPAM, PHISHING, SPAM!”, but it was delivered as gif.
Yup. Poor Brunhilda.
I’d email her back, except my actual valid communication would just get drowned out by all the “FW:FW:FW:FW:TRUE FRIENDS” and “URGETN! IMPORTANT INFORMATION WITHIN!” in her inbox. Perhaps if I put “VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM HOTMAIL STAFF” in the subject header she will read it?