The subject line is unfortunately untrue, because I would have had a serious talk with a spammer before allowing him to publish a document as disjointed as the following:Subject: Andy Oram has made great efforts at transforming my early ramblings into something actually worth printing.
This is not to say that I’ve never received a manuscript in as sorry a state as that excerpt, but I put it through several filters before releasing it. I certainly counsel my authors to indicate much earlier the point of their submission, which in the case of this email is a recommended stock pick.shows all major networks Outta Lynwood is an extremely guiltyand you’ll discover that this man isn’t just a smart-ass, but one really smart guy.I’d love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right nowIn its entirety, Straight downloads now in Y! Music’s TV Wants You. that was the best career choice for me.Reality Train cars derail, catch fire…
So who, among the general public, would associate me so automatically with something worth reading that spammers should thus take my name in vain? I wonder whether someone has done traffic analysis and determined whom I have corresponded with. Or is this subject line just going out to millions of people from Romania to Peru?
In any case, while I readily accept that the body of the message is computer-generated, the subject line rises above it to a semblance of coherence that I believe is beyond the artificial intelligence of our time. If it ain’t real praise, it at least attempts to approach reality within acceptable margins of error.
Andy,
It comes from here (Linux Network Administrators Guide). It's genuine praise, harvested and repurposed as SPAM.
I received spam today with that subject line and Googled it to see if it would confirm that it was, indeed, the same Andy Oram I carpooled with to the Middlesex tech writing program in the 80s. (I never thought you wrote the message though!) Spam makes it a small world.
As well as getting the Andy Oram ones, i've been graced with "Note that while you are allowed to print out the online version, you may not run the O'Reilly" Words to live by, no doubt.
My newest bored-at-work hobby is "spam whispering." When I get a particularly lovely sentence ("Andy Oram has made great efforts at transforming my early ramblings into something actually worth printing") I google it with quotation marks to find its origin. Frequently its from a blog or website that has no idea bits and pieces of its literary (or otherwise) soul are being stolen by nameless, faceless spammers. This is, in fact, how I found this particular blog post. Congratulations, you're famous -- in my spam box.