Evangelical Spam
Yesterday, as I was cleaning out my spam folder in GMail, I was surprised to see an offer to "FIND CHRIS*TIAN SING*LES IN YOUR AREA!!!!" It wasn't so much the idea of the message, as it is well known that there are thousands of swinging Christian ladies just looking for a good time. No, the part that surprised me was that they had to put an asterisk in the middle of the word "Christian".

It's an old practice to put special characters in the middle of words so that spam filters don't recognize them as spam titles. Common words are hor'ny, sing*le, unde-rage, Ere:ctile, Mort`gage, and Ro:ckha:rd. They're generally annoying, almost unreadable, and ultimately ineffective, because any normal spam filter can catch these anyway.

Still, it surprises me because, when the name of your religion is a signal for spambait, you might want to reconsider your methods of evangelism.




P.S. My favorite example of this was:

From: Mort`gage Direct
Subject: Jesus!

Sure, I'm not gonna click on it, but this Christian obviously feels very strongly about my potential home value!!
- posted by BrandG @ 12:52 AM