Re-Spamming

Probably I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, but it's a really fun one. Lately, I've been getting a lot of these E-mails with real enigmatic subject lines, like this latest one: 'Conscious approvingly'. And these enigmatic subject lines are matched with real persons names (Bert Lucero) so even though they are appearing in my yahoo bulk folder I still wanted to check them out - the first couple of ones at least and then I got wise.

I'm thinking that the whole deal is precisely that, to make you wonder what the hell 'Conscious Approvingly' means and then you open up the e-mail to find out. It's day trading, that one. There was absolutely nothing about consciousness or approval and Bert Lucero didn't even send that one. I know, there is no Bert involved with any of this; he's entirely fictional.

But here was my brainwave: I've got something to sell (my books) and they've got an e-mail address and at some point a real person will look at my reply. Voila! That's a list I can use to interest people in my books. Maybe they won't be all that interested in clicking through but guess what? I'm not all that interested in day-trading and I opened their stupid E-mail so ... fair is fair. You wasted a few seconds of my time and I will waste a few minutes of yours.

It's just too bad that the people whose time is being wasted aren't really the ones who are ultimately wasting my time. No, they're just some lowly, poorly paid humps who are earning a living. But my books are fun and interesting so it actually is well worth their time to click on through and they will be well rewarded when they buy and read them.

When I reply to these Spam E-mails Yahoo will usually give me a code to type in as an anti-spam measure, so really I'm actually not spamming anybody since I'm not doing it in bulk and the original spammers actually solicited a reply from me, which counts as a response to them even if I'm never, ever going to buy jack from them. Nope, not ever.

About half the time I get the Yahoo message that says: 'Daemon failure message not delivered' or something like that. Oh well, at least I tried.

I got one response from a real live human (yes, they exist in Cyberspace!). He must have gotten my re-spamming right then, because his e-mail came back within about five minutes. He said that he would forward the address because he knew some people who had 'children' in that age range. Oh boy. I rated these books as teen and above so I hope he doesn't think this is for anybody who doesn't have pubes, but I wasn't being misleading so ... it'll be okay. Nobody's morals will be corrupted who doesn't want them corrupted.

I'm going to continue re-spamming because even though the response is quite limited (one) it is rather satisfying to take up arms against the unwanted e-mail that show up in my bulk folder.

Speaking of selling: Oh please, check out my books. For some reason my link bar sometimes goes way to the bottom and not to the right so, please find it and click on my books and get one. You'll be so happy you did.

And tell your friends, too.