It seems while the experts are meeting to figure out how to stop spam, the spammers are exploiting new ways to spam. This morning my mailbox had over 100 messages with either the subject “market report” or “eviction notice.” What headers I checked showed this was from a botnet, sent to dozens of addresses at my domains.
Multiple news sources are reporting that Herman Cain, republican presidential hopeful from 2012. Maddow on Herman Cain’s new business model. Apparently, his email address list is for rent by just about anyone, including companies selling cures for erectile dysfunction.
Read MoreThings are getting stranger and stranger with Newsmax and the politicians they’re managing lists for. Earlier this week, recipients on Scott Brown’s list received emails with the subject line “5 Signs You’ll Get Alzheimer’s Disease.” The advertisement was for products and information from Dr. Blaylock, a contributor to Newsmax Health. Scott Brown told the political reporter at WMUR in New Hampshire that he did not authorize this email was cutting ties with Newsmax
Newsmax contacted me after I posted about unexpected email to the Herman Cain mailing list. They wanted to make it clear to me that their mailings were all double opt-in and that they adhered to all best practices. They also said that select advertisers were allowed to put ads in the body of messages from the politician to their supporters.
It seems, though, that may not be the whole truth. After I received the message from Newsmax, I signed up on caintv.com to see if they really were using double opt-in. While it is very possible that Mr. Cain was using double opt-in during the campaign, he isn’t any longer. I started receiving emails immediately, with neither a welcome message or a confirmation message.
In the case of Scott Brown’s list, the advertisement wasn’t from an outside advertiser, the advertisement was for a Newsmax columnist. And the ad wasn’t in the body of a message to supporters, it was the message to supporters. Mr. Brown has this to say about his likeness and mailing list being used by Newsmax.
There is a lot of mail that goes out to recipients that’s not really spam, but isn’t fully wanted. To describe these different kinds of mail, people have invented pork-product related terminology. Ham and bacn are both used to describe wanted mail, although possibly not wanted right now.
Now we have SCRAPPLE. It seems over the weekend a number of members of the Science Fiction Writers Association received email from someone asking them to consider one of his writings for an award. Reading through the tweets, this person typed hundreds of email addresses out of the SFWA directory into their mail client. And then sent mail to that list.
Recipients of that mail then went to twitter to complain about abuse of their email addresses in this way. Being writers, they discussed what word that would describe “something like spam, but not really.”
@talkwordy came up with Scrapple. Now, for those of you who don’t live in a very small part of the mid-Atlantic region, you may not know what scrapple is. Scrapple is a loaf pork product made from, well, scraps of pig. It often has a weird greenish tinge to it, presumably from the liver. My grandmother, having grown up in that small part of the mid-Atlantic region, used to eat it when she could find it. Usually it was in small, country diners where the waitresses call you darlin’ or hun.
By the end of the discussion the definition of scrapple was: Unwanted email from a person you know, which is annoying but not completely irrelevant to your interests, often manual address list creation.
There you have it. Scrapple joins bacn, ham, spam, and spim to describe different kinds of email.