Dadaist Spam

Every once and a while, I get dadaist spam.  It’s randomly generated, but I’m not sure what the point of it is, since unlike normal spam, there’s no attempt to make me do something.  There are no links or tracking pixels.  Perhaps a poorly written spam generator that instead cranks out surrealist prose mashups.

Here are a couple:

 

Subject:  Here Dinger visited her in the summer of 1971.

From: Minerva was the wife of James G.

Body:

Lorraine piston engines mounted in tandem pairs on the lower wing.
Creighton currently sits on the House Commerce, Judiciary, and State Government committees.
Back in Camelot, Sophia uses more than just her feminine charms to take control of Arthur’s heart. Everyone got on everybody’s nerves.

 

Subject:  New York having survived an attempted attack.

From:  I could so easily become.

Body:

The shopping occurred at a Target store in Downtown Brooklyn, the Atlantic Center Mall.
However, they were not saved due to prohibitive expense at the time of the early 1960s demolition.
Before the chickenpox vaccine became available there were 100 to 150 deaths from chickenpox among children in the U. Menuhin for bringing the manuscript to the world’s attention.

 

Somewhere out there, in some forgotten dusty corner of a server, a dadaist script keeps creating pieces and sending them to random people.  Tristan Tzara and William S. Burroughs would be proud.

Failed Successful Marketing

SO I got this email offer from newspaperarchive.com, who I used in the past, and almost went for the offer. But then I ran into issues. This is the email I ended up sending to their customer service:

Hi there,

I received an offer to reactivate my account for 50% off.
I wasn’t sure about it, but then thought, ah, what the heck, I can probably find some more stuff for my genealogy research.

I clicked the link, which brought me to this page:
[URL HERE[

When I clicked the “Save 50% Now” button to continue, a popup informed me:
“Sorry, but you are currently not eligible for this promotion.”

What?

Why?

Why send me an email with an offer if I can’t use that offer?

I mean email marketing is about getting people to:
a) read the email
b) click through the email
c) take action on the page they are brought to

Here I was, that most desirable of marketing targets, one willing to do all three things, and what do you do?
You tell me “no.”

No only does this fail to make a sale, but it makes the potential customer (me) dislike you for pulling a bait-and-switch.

So tell me, what was the point of this whole exercise?

-Tev Kaber, annoyed

Mail Woes

If you tried to email me at my tev (at) tev (dot) net account in the past two weeks, I didn’t get it – there was some kind of glitch at Points South that resulted in my mail bouncing instead of getting through.

Should be fixed now though, Alex started looking at it yesterday and figured it out today around noon. I tried a couple tests and they got through ok.

Since mail was bouncing, I think that two weeks of mail is gone forever. Snooj mentioned they might have the last day or two in a buffer, but I’m not counting on that, since it was bouncing in a weird way.

Which sucks… I was wondering why I never got an email notice when my E*Trade stock purchase went through, or when I tried that RealAge thing…

I’ve been toying with the idea of handling my mail through google, which would make sense since I use the gmail interface to check my mail anyway… I think I just have to get my mxrecords to point to gmail or something. Maybe I’ll look into it this weekend.

– – –

On the plus side, my E*Trade stock purchase cleared today, might take another day or two to transfer it into my bank account, but then I can pay off my discover card and car, and I’ll be debt free! Yay!