I am a sex god

I've been getting a lot of emails like this recently

Hi,
Hope I am not writing to wrong address. I am naice, pretty looaking girl. I am planning on visiting your town this month. Can we meet each other in person? Message me back at qzyv@directmailchat.info

Today was different, it came from somebody called Johnathan...

Makes you wonder how successful these kind of spams are, with a To: list of several people, a From: address that doesn't match the address they've asked me to reply to, a load of spelling mistakes and apparently coming from a girl with a boy's name.

The Great Australian Survey are spammers

I signed up with the Great Australian Survey (www<dot>aussiesurveys<dot>com<dot>au) to see where BetterDeal were mentioned and I started getting the usual crappy offers from them. Kind of expected that, but the emails had an unsubscribe link at the bottom. I've clicked on that twice now and ticked the relevant boxes on their site but I'm still getting the emails. Either they are completely incompetent (why on earth are they sending emails to a .co.uk address anyway?) or they are spammers.

The changing face of spam

The Random Pub Finder has been getting a lot of spam reviews recently. This isn't a big deal, the reviews go straight to my inbox and don't appear on the site until I put them there, but the weird thing is the content of these spams. Many of them are bacon-related. Here's an example

"a rasher ( and reland), or a slice ( orth merica). raditionally the skin is left on the cut and is known as bacon rind. indless bacon, however, is quite common. n the"

I just can't work out what on earth they are trying to achieve.

On the other hand, email spam seems to be getting more sophisticated. I'm now getting quite a lot of spam emails that contain a single image offering whatever penny stocks I really need to buy, followed by some text that isn't related and is obviously being added to get through the spam filters. How can we ever defeat that kind of spam?

Virgin Wines are spammers

I can't remember how it all started. I think I entered some competition that offered the chance to win some free wine (how could I refuse?) and Virgin Wines got hold of my email address. Soon I was getting an email every week or so exhorting me to purchase a case of wine. I've no idea whether Virgin Wines provide decent wine or not, but the fact I've got a Majestic Wines about five minutes away means I wasn't tempted to purchase anything from them, so I sent an email to unsubscribe@virginwines.com (after all they are reputable company, right?). Then, nothing. the emails kept coming. So I sent another. And the emails still didn't stop. Then I got an email from the founder of Virgin Wines, not apologizing but offering me more wine to buy. So I replied directly to him telling him his unsubscribe functionality didn't work. I then got an email from Customer Services saying "Thank you for contacting Virgin Wines and we have arranged for the email address you have provided to be removed from our mailing list which will be actioned within the next few days.". So that was the end of it? Well, no. I then received what looked like a personal email from the founder saying "Dear Christopher I thought that, as we were warning our staff not to lose out on last weeks free case offer, we should do the same for you!Please don't hang about - when the free cases are gone, they are gone! Go to www.virginwines.com/reminder9 Cheers, Rowan Gormley Founder Virgin Wines" I presumed I was actually being offered some free wine at this point, perhaps as an apology for all the emails. But looking at the offer showed it was just another attempt to get me signed up to Virgin Wines. OK, I'd get a free case but only if I bought another case... OK, the price looks pretty reasonable, coming to just over £3 a bottle, but my corner shop does a nice red at £10 for 3 bottles. Then today I got yet another email offering me more wine at bargain prices. Frankly I don't care how good Virgin Wines are, they are spammers, so I will not be buying any wine from them, ever. And perhaps their PR department will see this and realise their mistake. Or they'll sue me...