Dr Spamlove, by Jon Casimir - 1st May 2004
(Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald)

For the past couple of years, one of my late-night hobbies has been writing poetry. Not the heroic, manly verse of adventurers and dreamers. Not the dry-as-dust rhymes of the bush bards. And not the sensitive, soul-bearing lines of would-be chick magnets. I've been writing - though perhaps constructing would be a better word - spam poetry, piecing together odd little narratives from the subject lines of the junk email that pumps into my Inbox like digital effluent.

Why? That's a very good question and one I don't think I could answer without therapy. Perhaps it's better not to ask. All I know is that this hobby has made me probably the only person in the world who actually looks forward to checking out my new spam every morning. It has somehow made me able to look past the fact that spam is the common cold of the digital era - something we all get, something we're all irritated by, something we all feel that science should have eradicated by now.

Last time I counted, I was getting more than 200 unsolicited emails every day. That's about 20 for every legit one I get. It's quite a lot in the eyes of most people, though it's nothing to brag about. I've run into gnarled old netheads who claim, with more than a hint of Monty Python in their voices, to receive much more. "200 a day! Luxury! I get 500!" "500! 500!! I get 1000, and that's before elevenses!!!"

Me, I'm thinking a thousand would be a bit of a slog, but 500 mightn't be so bad. After all, the more junk I get, the more chance I have of finding inspiration. You never know when the perfect line will appear. And though many lines re-appear ad nauseum, there's always hope that today will be the day that something new and irresistible falls onto the screen. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

How did I get to this point of reconciliation with one of today's most unpopular intruders? In the late 1990s, when it became obvious that junk email was on an exponential trajectory, I ranted and railed against it with the best of them. Spam is, after all, the only form of junk mail that costs us money. We pay to download it. We take care of the bills for the bastards who send it. That injustice raked across my spine, narrowed my eyes in anger.

But after staring at all the spam for long enough, I began to see curious things. As with those 3D pictures that were all the rage a decade ago, concentrating on the screen allowed me to see patterns and shapes. After a while, I began to develop a vaguely academic fascination with junk email. I began to wonder what it said about the world we live in.

It occurred to me that, in a way, spam can be seen as an index of contemporary anxieties. It arrives not in our quasi-public letterboxes, but in our very private Inboxes, and so its content tends to be intimate. Because it has this access to our personal space, successful spam is able to play on personal fears, on our vulnerabilities. It hunts for psychological buttons and presses them. Spam attacks our inner selves in ways that other, more public advertising can't.

There is also a Darwinian aspect to its nature. The more you get about a certain subject, the more it suggests that subject embodies a particularly robust anxiety. If there weren't people out there responding to the weight loss offers, those deals would surely slow down or stop.

Over time, I began to develop an appreciation of the spammer's true art: the subject line. Because, let's face it, the hardest part of spamming is getting your message read. It's pretty easy for the emailee to delete at will. The subject line has to grab our attention and convince us to click.

I became an almost admiring onlooker, watching the sleight of hand, the textual gymnastics, the coercive techniques. Most spam attention-seeking gambits are simple, straightforward calls to action ("Save on Ink cartridges", "Get a bigger rod"), but there are also other, more curious approaches, my favourites of which are:

The Friend The email that pretends to be from someone you know. Its subject line is chatty and informal, along the lines of "Hi Dave" or "Dave, you left your umbrella at my house". Usually, the name is whatever is in front of the @ symbol in your email address, though in the past year I've noticed the spammers are trying random names, probably in the hope they'll hit the jackpot eventually. Recently I actually got a "Hi Jon" email, and it felt sort of dirty.

The Official Notice The trick here is to use a phrase that connotes urgency or a problem we would normally have to deal with. These can come in the form of familiar lines such as "Your account is overdue" or computer jargon such as "Undeliverable mail" or "Failure notice". I've been caught this way a billion times.

The Trojan Horse A subject line at complete odds with the content of the email, designed to tantalise you. Not long ago, I was receiving bunches of Get Rich Quick spam with pornographic subject lines. Oddly enough, at the same time, I was regularly receiving porn spam with financial subject lines. I guess each business was after the other's target market.

The Filter Beater These have become much more common in the past couple of years, as people have tried to keep spam at bay. Basically, they're the ones where the keywords are altered so the kill software won't pick them up. They look like misspellings, but they're intentional: "Medi.call.y proven to en.lar.ge your p.e.n.is nat.ural.ly" or "X@n3x, V|c0d1n , C1al1s Low Pr1ces".

The Salvador Dali A subject line so weird that you feel you have to check it out. They can be as simple as "pupate" or as complex as one I got last week, which was curiously reminiscent of 1960s poetry: "inconspicuous thunderclap marvin upholster ester denture nadine brighton tallow cancelled abash worthwhile coffee wuhan dusenbury windstorm alligator or paleozoic minneapolis gentility nairobi bump".

Then one morning in late 2002, I had an epiphany. I noticed - and I don't know why I hadn't seen this before - that there were juxtapositions in some of the subject lines on the screen. If I remember correctly, it was the following sequence that struck me:

I have what you need
my white cotton panties
Size does matter

Instantly, I realised that if I could collect enough subject lines, I could bolt together some Frankenverse. Or Spoetry, as I prefer to call it. Since then, I've copied and stored away more than 10,000 promising subject lines. I've finished about 70 spoems, and have about half as many in various stages of completion, most waiting for the perfect line to come along. This was one of the first and remains a favourite:

Marry a Russian mail order bride.
Yours to Have Today!
Not too old to put out!
Buy 1, get 1 free!
you can order in complete privacy
14 day free trial!
IT'S CALLED FREEDOM

What appeals to me about spoems, apart from the dumb fun of putting them together, is the strange resonances, discordances, between the lines. Sometimes it's obvious where a line has come from. Sometimes it's not.

Miss Carey has some exciting news for you!
School Holiday Program
Play Free Head to Head Games of Skill
Play for Fun or Play for Real!
Cutting edge toys for children
Naughty 'n' wild
She'll make sure you have fun in 30 mins or less

I've cobbled together a few spaiku:

Smoking is harmful!
I do it because its fun
White Teeth Guaranteed

Memo: to My Pets
I know what you are doing
No, oh, that's just wrong

I've even managed a limerick, though getting the syllable count right was a killer. For the past year or so I've been showing them to friends, who say nice things but give me that "You've got too much time on your hands" look.

What Can You Do in 3 Minutes?
Look out your window
Make a child happy
Groom those bushy eyebrows
Get residency in Panama
Lose 10 lbs.
Remove dents
Pupate

Incoming! What's in the junk email

I went through the past 4000 spam emails I received and sorted them into categories. What emerges is a list of the popular anxieties, a jigsaw picture of human worry. If you asked most people to guess, I suspect they would say that the vast majority of spam was made up of The Three Ps: pornography, penile enhancement and pharmaceuticals. And it's true that these dominate, but it's equally clear that we're as worried about money, our looks, our futures, and about our many and varied weaknesses.

Erectile assistance - 16 percent
Get Money Fast options - 13 percent
Pharmaceuticals - 12 percent
Pornography - 12 percent
Discounts and "free" offers - 10 percent
Weight loss/health products - 7 percent
Stock tips - 4 percent
Degree offers - 3 percent
Car products and services - 3 percent
Insurance deals - 2 percent
Dating services - 2 percent
eBay tuition - 2 percent
Unreadable foreign spam - 1 percent
Discount cigarettes - 1 percent
Cable TV deals - 1 percent
Work from home plans - 1 percent

Less than 1 percent

Privacy/PC protection
Online games
DIY spam software
Pet products
Nigerian-style fraud scams

Infofile

While the prime subjects of spam culture remain fairly constant, it is always open to fad.

For a month last year, I averaged 40 Paris Hilton emails a day, almost none of which had the same subject line (they got weirdly, progressively more twisted). In March this year, not a day went by without many people offering me one or another spin-off product from Mel Gibson's The Passion. For all the inherent degeneracy of spam, our Christian friends have not been backward in using it.

From next week, Icon will feature spoetry on page 3. If you love it, hate it, or feel inspired to write your own, send your thoughts or verse to icon.copy@access.fairfax.com.au

Links:

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