A Few Words About Email, Spam, Macs, Men’s Health

Mac360’s co-founder was my best friend for many years. It’s nearly three years since she died. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t think of her. Good memories are not easily dismissed. Neither is spam.

I’ve been monitoring Tera’s email address for a few years. For the first few months after her death there would be an occasional message from a friend or acquaintance. These day’s her email is mostly about men’s health. Let me explain.

Between ISP spam filters and OS X’s Junk Mail filter we still get spam; unwanted email messages disguised as real email for the unsuspecting. If you use an email address and send messages to PC loving friends then it’s almost impossible to not get spam eventually.

Tera had two email addresses that she used for years. One was Yahoo! and the other for Mac360. I’ve monitored both for nearly three years. The number of messages has become fewer, yes, and the balance between a legitimate message (those I reply to) and spam has changed.

Spam is winning. What about men’s health? That’s the latest email spam craze, I guess. Tera’s inbox this morning was flooded with email spam about men’s health.

Ostensibly, the messages come from MensHealth.com, which as all male Mac users know, is the Men’s Guide to Fitness, Health, Weight Loss, Nutrition, Sex, Style, and Guy Wisdom. Talk about lack of focus.

The problem with the email is that it seldom matches the aforementioned MensHealth.com topics. Some of the email subject matter is obviously spam; “You’ve received an answer to your question,” is one.

There’s the ubiquitous “iTunes.com Invoice #82596.” What? That’s the same invoice number as your last iTunes invoice? What a surprise. How does that happen.

“Fatburner - lose 8 pounds” is another subject Tera’s received en mass recently. The funniest was “Urgent! Timberlake distraught with grief.” Good grief, spammers! Is that the best you can do?

“Customer Receipt/Purchase Confirmation” always catches my eye as an email subject worthy of at least looking at if not touching and clicking.

Speaking of clicking. That’s what I do with spam. I bounce it back with a click. The vast majority of spam that I bounce also bounces right back to me, but I set up a filter to send it the Trash.

Almost of the MensHealth.com spam contains graphic offers to Subscribe to Men’s Health Today. However, the link is not to MensHealth.com, but to various and sundry web sites, posing as Canadian Pharmacy, which sell Canadian pharmaceuticals online.

Each email message has different links to different sites but all have the same layout, just different domain names. Viagra, Cialis, Viagra Super Active (I don’t even want to ask); it’s all there. Tera would love to have sliced and diced an outfit so poorly run that they send hundreds of email spam to the same address.

Even if you’re a careful Mac user and care about who you send email to, you can still get on some spammer list without much effort.

Send an email message to Windows PC user whose computer has a worm or virus (and there are tens of millions of those), and your email address gets harvested for later spamming.

It’s one thing to spam the living, but it’s something else to spam those who live on in memory. It’s been a few months since I’ve received any legitimate email to Tera’s email accounts.

Now it’s time to close the door on yesterday. And close the door on those who peddle Viagra and Cialis online. May your brains become infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.