Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The Nature of Spam


I just noticed an interesting phenomena. I'm wondering if one could use this phenomena as a measure of the health of the economy. Here it is:

I use Google's "Gmail" for my email reading. I use it to capture emails from lots of sources. Gmail, of course, grabs my Gmail account, but it also captures the email from my ISP based email as well as my little company's email. So I get all of my email accounts in one place that I can get to anywhere. As you might guess, I also capture a lot of spam. Gmail is very good about recognizing the spam for what it is and putting it in a folder called "Spam", much to Hormel's dismay. I get maybe 100 to 200 spam a day. I usually look in the spam folder once or twice a day and empty out the contents. I've never found anything valuable in there though I've never looked for more than 3 -5 seconds.

So here's what I've noticed. If you looked into my spam folder a year ago, you would have seen lots of ads for male enhancement products, a decent sampling of weight loss schemes, a good dose of porn offerings and, of course, ads for cheap replica watches. There were also a lot of online pharmacies, but they were primarily hawking Viagra, so I'd put them in the male enhancement catagory.

When I looked at the spam this morning, there was almost none of the usual stuff. The spam was almost entirely focused on "How to Make Money, Easy and Quick", or some variant thereof. Out of the first 50, there was only one spam related to something sexual. The rest were all about making or saving money the quick and easy way. I think this is a sign of the times. Here's an example.


I'll continue to monitor this phenomena and try to see if I can ascertain some insight as to when to get back into the stock market. When I do, well, maybe I'll have something to help you learn "How to Make Money, Easy and Quick". Unfortunately, I suspect that all this is a trailing rather than a leading indicator.

If you're bored, try strolling through your spam folder and see if you notice the same thing.

Bye for now.