I expect to receive, anytime soon, an official looking email from the Fedral Resurve, asking me to send them all my muney to check it for germs. Crooks don't use spellcheckers; at least, the 5 crooks a day that send me emails don't. They also haven't mastered elegant bureaucratic prose. There's a fine line between legalese and pure nonsense, but the line is there, and they cross it.
Watching this scam parade march across my new mail screen every day, I am reminded of the real point of all those lessons in grammar and style and spelling from junior high -- stuff that can still tumble me into depression on a bad day. We were really learning how to leave a calling card embossed over our writing: "I am somebody who cares about detail, who takes time, who doesn't want to be unnecessarily offensive, and who knows the rules." When we scan our world, we look for such people, not because they are infallibly good -- surely the worst people have mastered the elementary tricks of civility -- but because folks who aren't like that are possibly dangerous, and we just can't take that risk. It's a pretty efficient mechanism.
Posted by shea0017 at February 26, 2005 8:58 AMWhile I think your spelling hypothesis has some merit, spam e-mails frequently contain key words that are purposely misspelled in order to decrease the liklihood that they'll be flagged by anti-spam filters. To me that sounds self-defeating since, having bypassed the filter, the e-mails are less likely to be acted upon. But perhaps their intended targets are thought to be less discerning.
Posted by: Tyson at March 12, 2005 4:10 PM