Uses for spam

Recently I re-directed all my personal mail to go to GMail due to amount of storage and availability that they offered. After switching over I noticed that the spam filter worked quite well, so I decided to re-direct my dreaded “junkmail” account as well. This is the address I use for any random internet form that is going to send me an email and expect me to able to check it to set up an account. If they don’t require this little exchange I use “hi@hi.com” because whoever actually owns that domain deserves it.

Anyway, after forwarding all the junk mail to the GMail account I cleared out the spam folder to try and get a good count for how much spam I received in a day. I forwarded the mail at 23: on Sunday evening and I currently have 597 spams, which is 7.1 spams an hour or 170 spams per day. I was pretty impressed by this number, and considered it a victory over the spam community. Yay for me!

While on the subject of spam, I came across this site a few weeks ago that had decided to put all that spam to use and build haikus out of the captured spam messages, which I thought was an incredibly clever idea. Then today I saw this post on Diary of a Network Geek which had found yet another clever final solution to the spam problem. After reading this I decided to see if anyone else had come up with any bright ideas on solving the spam problem. I stumbled upon a J-Walk post that created poetry from spam using Excel (of course). After I found that I figured that should be the extent of my search before I found some thing really strange. However, it’s good to know that in addition to being an annoyance spam can offer amusement to the masses as well. Yay for spam I guess?