June 29, 2003

Canadian Anger

Spam Assassin is doing a bang-up job of filtering the 2-300 SPAMs I receive daily. The Bayesian filtering is awesome, and I rarely get a false positive. But about once a month a legitimate email gets classified as SPAM, so I keep an eye on my SPAM bucket.

This evening I got one from comeseecanada.com. That's the outfit that has been running some fairly funny ads on radio touting Canada as a tourist destination for Americans squeamish about taking the waters in Baghdad. The SPAM directed me to Travel Canada - Spring/Summer Canadian Getaways , which contained a gag similar to the ones they've been running on radio and TV.

Now, there is NFW I could have "opted-in" to their SPAM list, so I knew it was a genuine SPAM. I looked them up in whois, and sure enough, the record had been created this past May. This was a new marketing organization, or a new division of an old one, whose techies were either clueless or unable to restrain the marketing honchos.I sent the following love letter to the admin and technical contact, both the same person

Along with many another ignorant American, I always cherished an
illusion that Canadians were just a little more civil than their
cousins to the south. This evening, that illusion was rudely
shattered by the attached email.

NOW I KNOW YOU ARE NO MORE THAN NO GOOD, LOW DOWN, SLIME SUCKING SPAM
MONGERS!

I make it a policy never to do business with anyone who has sent me
SPAM. I can't tell from your site whether you are affiliated with the
Canadian Government. It's a good thing too, because if you were,
I'd have to WRITE OFF YOUR ENTIRE COUNTRY!

Finally, there's a mantra you might want to chant to ward off
hyper-angry, ex-potential customers:

OPT-OUT IS SPAM
OPT-OUT IS SPAM
OPT-OUT IS SPAM

Fondly,





Posted by hbo at June 29, 2003 08:00 PM


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