My Favourite Spam

Sometimes a film is so bad that it's actually a much loved 'classic'. I think this also applies to songs once in a while. 

Most people know they shouldn't like it, and they perhaps even pretend in public (to save face) that they dislike it - but secretly they love it. 

Recently I have started receiving spam emails that I believe fall into this bracket. 

The emails are from a Joyo at mk-time.com.
I can only presume that somehow they decided to mass email all emails containing "clock" in the domain, as I have certainly never visited their site or signed up for a newsletter - or for that matter purchased anything from them.

In a very weird way, I'm glad! The emails bring a smile to my face every-time I receive one. Have a look at them: pure genius (make sure to read the text too)!:

Love 'em!

On a more serious note, a good way (provided your email service allows) to find out if you have been subscribed to email you never asked for, is to use a technique called "address tags" or "sub-addressing"

Definition from Wikipedia:

Some mail services allow a user to append a tag to their email address (e.g., where joeuser@example.com is the main address, which would also accept mail for joeuser+work@example.com or joeuser-family@example.com). The text of tag may be used to apply filtering and to create single-use addresses. Some IETF standards-track documents, such as RFC 5233 refer to this convention as "sub-addressing".

So, assuming your email provider allows, when you register on a site, or sign-up for a newsletter, you can use the site's name to ensure that any email you receive is coming from the site you requested, and that they haven't sold your data to another company.

For example:

Joe Bloggs wants to register on acmecorp.com. His email address is usually joebloggs@example.com, but he signs up with: joebloggs+acmecorp@example.com.

He could then filter all mail to joebloggs+acmecorp@example.com to a sub-folder/tag in his inbox called 'Acme Corp'.

If he receives an email to joebloggs+acmecorp@example.com from another company other than acmecorp.com he knows that either they have sold his data to another company or that someone has email harvested his address.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the spam from mk-time, have you got any spam that you love?!

Update: Received one moments after posting blog entry :)