Finding A New Start In Spam

You may not like them, but you’ve got to give spammers some credit for their imagination (or the imagination of their sender-name-randomizing software, or however they insert names into the sender field of their spam). If you’re looking to change your name and start a new life somewhere, you could do worse than look in your spam folder and grab a name at random. One particularly inventive bunch just sent me five emails advertising software, from the following “folk”:

• Risked. A. Vying
• Swanson E. Conjures (I suspect it’s pronounced Con-Ju-Res)
• Porters B. Radicalism
• Whimper Q. Region (what does the Q stand for, I wonder? Quisling? Quincy? Querulous?) and my favorite, the rakish, take-no-prisoners
• Glider O. Bastard (the O almost certainly standing for Ogilvy)

On closer inspection the same guy has sent me dozens of emails over the past week or two, all of them boasting excellent candidates for characters’ names. A sampling:

• Jealousies F. Spoonbill
• Grafters E. Squall
• Orchid T. Strictness
• Fluttering S. Navaho (great Native American name)
• Locks Q. Shorelines and
• Mollusc C. Enacted

New life seekers, take your pick. Except Glider, that’s mine.

 

Comments

[shiraz]

ack. you pre-empted me and the list i've been compiling. had been meaning to put the following on my blog soon (but it's like potato chips, you keep thinking oh i'll just wait and get one more, just one more, and so it never ends...):
- Oonagh Newingham
- Opportunistic S. Lamb
- Lavona Whitehead (with subject line "Are you ready to get it?")
- Kilogram K. Crating
- Georgianna English (porn star, anyone?)
- Marveling H. Gangplank
- Teemed T. Delve
- Henrietta Patel (Indian porn star, anyone?)
- Aamu Ventura
- Numbers Gallagher
- Larissa Gibbons (with subject line "Loooking Forward to Romantic Get...")
- Sage Talley (with subject line "Save your money...")
- V Shoop
- Shellfish P. Cheshire (hybrid offspring of a mollusc and a smileyfaced cat, maybe?)

i foresee a whole new generation of Internet party games with this stuff...

[Jeremy Wagstaff]

excellent, thanks Shiraz. How do the spammers generate these names? I assume some sort of randomizer, but these are names PG Wodehouse or Carl Hiaasen would be proud of..

[Jeremy Wagstaff]

Here are some more:
Ragging E. Artificiality
Plectrum M. Schemer
Miffed P. Monthly
Windmill S. Plow
Bitumen H. Prizefighting