SubscribeMany people are obsessed with spam at the moment, which is hardly surprising given the nature of the stuff and the fact that we all have to spend so much time marking it up to train our filters, then checking the filter’s got it right and so on.
Yet Spam is as much a part of contemporary culture as… well… just about anything you care to name. If Spam were a person he (and he’d definitely be a he) would be up there with all our other hate figures and there’re plenty of them. Searching for Spam on Google News, the first headline I got today was, ‘The Deadly Duo: Spam and Viruses’. Someone somewhere (McAfee perhaps) probably has the code for every virus safely locked away, the IT equivalent of the ultimate bio-terror. But what of the Spam. Millions – billions – of messages outnumbering all the legitimate stuff is hurled through cyberspace every day… only to be deleted in anger and frustration. So I’ve decided to rescue some of it with Stephen Newton’s Museum of Spam.
None of the spam e-mails in the Museum will be solicited. They will arrive as a result of placing the e-mail address stephennewton.mofs@blogger.com in the public domain by posting it on this website and that of the Museum. As befits a Museum of Spam, there will be no curator.
Update: 3 June 2004
If you’ve found yourself here as a result of visiting My Museum of Spam: Welcome! And do feel free to comment on the project here.
Most visitors get here after receiving spam themselves and web searching the alleged the sender. Typically, these claim to be lottery wins or are scams in the Nigerian style. If that’s what brought you here, don’t embarrass us all by asking how to claim your lottery win. There’s more on the Nigerian scam here.
But do stick around; the latest blog’s here.
Don’t be patronised by the graffiti wall!
