Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Spam, Old People and Caps Lock

I'm in the habit of scrolling through the Spam folder in my email ever since I lost a "real" email from a friend years ago. I look to make sure nothing got filtered as Spam that shouldn't have, and I also like reading some of the subject lines because they can be funny.

This leads me to certain thoughts:

This one isn't exactly Spam related, but what the hell is the deal with CAPS LOCK? It seems to be mainly older people. Do they think "Hey, I'll just use capital letters all the time so I don't have to use the Shift key at the beginning of each sentence and for proper nouns"? You might as well go the other way, and never capitalize, because either way is equally grammatically incorrect, and to the rest of us, THIS IS THE SAME THING AS YELLING.

Is anybody fooled by an unsolicited email from a "bank executive" in an African nation who has a depositor who died with a large balance and no heirs, and just wants you to help him get the money before his government claims it? He chose you because you were referred to him because of your outstanding Christian morals, after all. All he needs is your date of birth, snail mail address, bank account number and password. What harm could possibly come from that? You have nothing to lose and millions to gain...

And how about those emails from "Face Book"? Women who can't spell their own names correctly, but they want to have sex with you. Tonight. And the emails directly from the women themselves with subject lines like "Wanna get it on?"...  I can picture some old man who just doesn't quite understand how the Interweb works, who feels the need to answer every correspondence:

"Dear Tatiana, I'm really flattered, but I'm a happily married man. You seem like a nice young lady, and pretty, too. I'm sure you'll have no problem finding a nice young man your own age to help you with your immigration problems."

Of course, being an old man, though, his reply would be in all caps and full of misspelled words...

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