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The irony about the CeBIT email flood is that it makes them look desperate — yet their PR person told me yesterday that at this point, three weeks out from the start, they’ve already got more registrations than they did on opening day last year. So why do the emails keep coming? My guess is that at some point weeks ago, some executive somewhere signed off on a marketing plan, and now everyone’s dutifully following it. How… old-fashioned.
Hannover Fairs, the organisers of the CeBIT Australia IT trade show, must be shitting themselves about poor ticket sales or something. They certainly seem desperate.
These guys are spammy at the best of times, sending at least one email a week every week. But this year I’ve received three “Exclusive Limited Offer: Free Exhibition Entry” emails this month alone, plus today another one via the Australian Computer Society — yeah, that’s fuckin’ exclusive, eh? They’ve emailed a “Dear Bloggers” media release and phoned. Gawd!
I was underwhelmed last year and annoyed with the marketing wank-words.
Do these shows actually achieve anything any more? I mean, if you’ve got a new IT product you just tell TechCrunch and the geek world’s blogosphere of feral goldfish do the rest, right? Why herd everyone into a room, except to fuel an industry of hangers-on who make t-shirts and lame promotional giveaways?
[P.S. I am actually going. If nothing else I can collect some high-grade sarcasm for my podcast. But enough with the spam already, Hannover!]
Spam subject line just received: “Voted the most effective male enlargement supplement product by MYSPACE users.” Well, there’s a recommendation, eh?
Is this a new kind of spam? MP3 spam! An email I received overnight had no content apart from an MP3 audio file — which was a voice-synthesized announcement of whatever it was they were selling.
70% of the email processed by my business’ mail server is spam, at least according to this morning’s stats.
8990 messages Scanned by MailScanner
253.5 Total MB
6341 Spam messages detected by MailScanner
1117 Messages forwarded unscanned by MailScanner
8 Viruses found by MailScanner
18 Banned attachments found by MailScanner
401 Content Problems found by MailScanner
6361 Messages delivered by MailScanner
That’s pretty much the same as last year. And the vast majority of inbound email connections are rejected for being from known spam sources before they even get a chance to be processed by MailScanner!
Previously I had a geosynchronous taxidermist, now the latest spam subject line is “sheepish taxidermist”. And Richard had “self-actualized bullfrog.” “What next,” he asks. “‘Well-adjusted toad’? ‘Passive-aggressive mudskipper’?” Indeed.
Mostly I ignore spam, but I love it when the “random word” subject lines create a joyous concept. Such as today’s effort: geosynchronous taxidermist. Now there’s a speciality!
The Australian Government’s “Do Not Call” register, where you can tell telemarketers not to phone you, opened for business yesterday. In the first 24 hours, more than 200,000 Australians listed their phone numbers.
While clearing out the spammers’ attempts to post comments to this website today, I was struck by the rather attractive rhythm they formed — if “attractive” is the right word. Here, then, is the first poetry I’ve written in more than 20 years, entitled…
On Australia Day, Google Maps did a flyover of Sydney to take low-level photos. A small ISP decided to create an advertisement in the photos. So is that spam? Or as one commenter pointed out, were they just acting on Google’s invitation to “get involved”?
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