Surya does its business via phone and email, and our email has been overwhelmed by spam. Last week, I trained SpamAssassin on one of our sales manager’s spam folder and set it loose over the Thanksgiving weekend. It blocked well over a thousand spam mails from reaching people’s inboxes.
Instead, I sent them to mine, so I could make sure non-spam wasn’t getting blocked. Many spam mails today are one big image with an ad in it, followed by random snippets of text that have nothing to do with anything to make it seem to a spam filter like it was an actual email.
My favorite line: “I need you to go find the little gopher.” Just for the heck of it, wasted some time thinking what the story this came from might have been like. Maybe someday some spammer will scan this blog for random text to use in their spam and there it’ll be again! I want to know what happened in the third one 😛 maybe I should expand it.
10AM. Through the murky glass of my office window, I watched cars bump and slide down the rain-slick street like logs on the way to the sawmill, with Versace-adorned dames instead of flannel-shirted Canadians. The half-empty bottle of whiskey stared at me from the floor where I’d left it. It was a war of wills I always lost. Then she walked into my office. “I need you to go find the little gopher,” she said.
“Aw, Ma!” I yelled. “Why?”
“I need you to go find ‘The Little Gopher’, Priscilla,” said my Ma again. She was really mad this time. “The library wants to charge us twenty dollars to replace it! What did you do with it, anyway!?
For a second I thought of those pictures of gophers having tea, and going for walks, and flying kites, that I had pasted on the wall of my closet. They all seemed so happy!
This was no time for the truth. “Jones!” I shouted to my assistant. He looked away from the television screen where talking heads alternately yelled and sobbed as the awful news scrolled by beneath them in two-inch high letters.
“Yeah. Yeah boss.”
“I need you to go find the little gopher. Tell her to turn on the television. Actually don’t tell her anything. Just tell her to come here. And see that she does.”
“Honey, I found your lizard and your two hamsters and I’m looking for your snake because there’ll be Hell to pay if your mother comes home and finds out your brother’s friends set all the animals loose. But I need you to go find the little gopher before it gets out into the lawn, or we’ll never see it again.”
