It seems while the experts are meeting to figure out how to stop spam, the spammers are exploiting new ways to spam. This morning my mailbox had over 100 messages with either the subject “market report” or “eviction notice.” What headers I checked showed this was from a botnet, sent to dozens of addresses at my domains.
Christine Borgia has a post on the Return Path blog where she interviews a number of different groups (spamfilters, DNSBLs, mailbox providers) about their filtering strategy for the holidays. Overall, no one changes their filtering during the Holiday Mailing Season. On the other hand, many marketers do change their marketing strategies in ways that trigger more filtering and blocking.
The take home message? Pay attention to what is being sent and who it is being sent to. This is nothing new, but many marketers seem to forget it in the effort to get into their customers’ inboxes.
There is a lot of mail that goes out to recipients that’s not really spam, but isn’t fully wanted. To describe these different kinds of mail, people have invented pork-product related terminology. Ham and bacn are both used to describe wanted mail, although possibly not wanted right now.
Now we have SCRAPPLE. It seems over the weekend a number of members of the Science Fiction Writers Association received email from someone asking them to consider one of his writings for an award. Reading through the tweets, this person typed hundreds of email addresses out of the SFWA directory into their mail client. And then sent mail to that list.
Recipients of that mail then went to twitter to complain about abuse of their email addresses in this way. Being writers, they discussed what word that would describe “something like spam, but not really.”
@talkwordy came up with Scrapple. Now, for those of you who don’t live in a very small part of the mid-Atlantic region, you may not know what scrapple is. Scrapple is a loaf pork product made from, well, scraps of pig. It often has a weird greenish tinge to it, presumably from the liver. My grandmother, having grown up in that small part of the mid-Atlantic region, used to eat it when she could find it. Usually it was in small, country diners where the waitresses call you darlin’ or hun.
By the end of the discussion the definition of scrapple was: Unwanted email from a person you know, which is annoying but not completely irrelevant to your interests, often manual address list creation.
There you have it. Scrapple joins bacn, ham, spam, and spim to describe different kinds of email.
What this disclaimer means?
You are receiving this email because you have a customer relationship or have opted-in to an email list managed by the Emailing Entity listed below. This email was not sent to you by the company or website identified in the offer above, for which we have a separate business relationship. We have represented to such company or website that we have the affirmative right to email you with an offer on their behalf.
Read More