Today is a Spamalog day. Around 6, I received the missive excerpted below:

and then, over a glass of Yarmouth grog, we will have the
the greater Mr. Peggottys ecstasy became, and the more he rubbed his head in his mothers lap to be out of harms way, and little unable to liquidate, brought a tear into the manliest eye present. than forty-seven persons must have been accommodated with dinner at of thy true eyes, in that same time, the spirit of my child-wife
I am so blest, Trotwood

The sender was “Scot Hutchinson,” a particularly effective spamoniker, as it resembles the name of someone I actually know. But the real author of this doggerel is not Mr. Hutchinson, but Charles Dickens. Casual Googling reveals that Trotwood and Peggotty are both characters from David Copperfield, and an unscientific analysis of diction leads me to believe that the rest of the excerpt is simply more DC fed through some sort of gibberish-izer.

It’s a sad world in which a spammer can bastardize a timeless classic (who among us has not read the first fifty or a hundred pages of this tome?) — rendering it nothing more than a bizarre footnote to a sales pitch? The DC stuff, I should mention, followed a long description of Koko Petroleum, a stock which “IS GOING TO ROCKET.” For the uninitiated, this type of email is meant to drive up the price of a penny stock, allowing the spammer to sell high and reap double or triple the initial investment. Presumably the SEC will do something about this, but for now the evil scheme seems to work pretty well.

Posted in the spamalog: because spam never takes a holiday

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