I’m seeing a lot of word salad spam comments this weekend. It’s entertaining to read them in the vocal style of a Cylon hybrid. #
I’ve been seeing spam with subjects including, “Every macho should have a cool watch” and “Look like real macho with that trendy watch!” I’ve also been seeing spam saying things like, “Don’t miss your chance to become a real macho and by that we mean increasing your male dimensions.” At first it was funny that two spam campaigns were using the promise of machismo to hawk completely different products for completely different purposes.
Then I thought: what if they’re not different purposes. What if they’re saying that once you’ve “increased your dimensions,” you’ll be able to wear another watch? 
Follow more humorous spam observations at lol_spam.
Spammers have been using misspellings, synonyms and malapropisms for years now. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Viagra/Cialis/etc. spam using the word “pilule” instead of “pill.” At first they’d just find misspellings for the drug name, but I guess some filters are blocking or scoring on “pill,” so they’ve substituted words for that…including the hilariously ironic “soft” as an abbreviation for “soft tabs.” (Comments on this post are going to give Akismet a workout, aren’t they?)
Anyway, I found it odd that so many different spams would use the same obfuscation, particularly since it looked like it was just adding letters. So I looked it up.
It turns out that pilule is a real word. According to Merriam-Webster, it entered the English language from French around 1543. Sadly, it doesn’t refer to a cute magical creature, but to a small pill — which means that (wonder of wonders) the spammers are actually using it correctly!
One question remained: was it simply an obscure word, or an archaic one? I did a search on Google Books and came up with mostly medical texts dating from the 19th century. Just about every match in the first 15 pages was either:
The few cases where I thought I’d found a more recent reference turned out to be reprints of older material.
So it looks like the word died out (in English, anyway) during the 20th century until spammers exhumed its corpse and pressed it into service.
On Friday, I posted the discovery to Twitter on @lol_spam, then retweeted it on KelsonV. Within 15 minutes, lol_spam picked up 45 new followers and KelsonV picked up 40. They were all obviously bots:
I will give them credit for using ordinary-looking snapshots of women with a wide variety of appearances, rather than going for the lingerie, downblouse, outright nude (the spam filters are going to be busy, aren’t they?) and other sexy (or “sexy”) poses that usually show up on these. They actually looked like photos real people might use on their profiles.
Nice try, spambots.
“TPA Report.” It should be a TPS Report, but the keys are, like, right next to each other. I guess even spammers can get a case of the Mondays. #
AMAZING false-color NASA satellite pic of the damage caused by LA’s Station Fire. #
Spam subject: “I have Salvia! Join me
” – I misread this as “saliva”…and almost did a spit-take (really!) #
Sometimes you’ve just got to laugh, you know?
I remember getting my first piece of spam in college, in the days before anyone bothered with filters because spam was so rare, and thinking, “this could get bad.” Talk about the understatement of the decade! Since the mid-1990s, recipients and sysadmins have come up with more and more elaborate ways to block the annoyance, and the spammers have developed ever more convoluted ways to get around our filters.
And sometimes, those convolutions are frakking hilarious.
Weird word substitutions, funny misspellings (deliberate and otherwise), utter nonsense, creative euphemisms and more lurk in the world’s junk mail folders. Half of the spam category on this blog isn’t serious commentary — it’s examples of clueless or unintentionally funny quotes from actual spam.
These are all quotes (mostly subjects) from spam I’ve seen:
A few weeks ago I realized most of these were really short, and I’d been posting them to Twitter. Why not set up a dedicated account for spam humor? So I set up @lol_spam and started posting the funnier subjects I came across, usually with a comment.
I was definitely inspired by the webcomic Spamusement, but I can’t draw worth beans. A line of snarky commentary? That I can do! And I was almost certainly influenced by artist Linzie Hunter’s Spam one-liner postcards, though I’d somehow forgotten about them until someone posted a link to the set yesterday.
Where am I getting the spam quotes?
I see a lot of spam, and I don’t want to simply flood people’s Twitter streams with, well, more of it, so I’m using FutureTweets to spread things out to a more manageable 1 or 2 posts per day. At the moment I’m almost 3 weeks ahead.
I’m also keeping an eye on a twitter search for “spam subject” and retweeting the funniest ones.
So if you use Twitter, take a look at @lol_spam. Who knows? You just might laugh!
Help open video spread at SXSW— check out our proposals, vote for them, and tell your open video amigos #
Spam subject: “With our watches precious minutes will go slower.” So it’s a selling point that they don’t keep time correctly? #
